When you buy a phone or laptop (let alone a refurbished one), would you prefer it to be ‘okayish’ or the best that money can buy?
Now imagine, you want to add a better camera, a higher battery capacity or even a faster processor and changing these in a matter of minutes without even visiting a repair center!
Did you know that you can in fact upgrade your phone and laptop nowadays! Check out FairPhone B.V., Terracube and Framework)
This experience is quite comparable to No-Code application development. With some experience and tailored guidance, even your typical designer or other employees with non-IT background can build powerful applications.
At Webbit21, we believe digital business solutions must be designed and built to reduce human effort and bring more productivity for organizations. If a manual effort can get tasks done faster, cleaner and adds more value to the process flow, then it is best to not create a digital version of it.
If you are not familiar with No-Code, check this post from us 👉 What is No-Code?
I believe No-Code and Low-Code are such technologies that are starting to become familiar in the app development space. This means you can quickly prototype and test new features, process flow changes, and bring new insights to your digital solutions. NoCode / LowCode platforms claim to help you achieve up to 10x faster development speeds in comparison to coding based development. Many at times, our best deliverable speeds for Clients are 15x or more faster than counter proposals in traditional coding based approach. Here are five approaches that make our NoCode project deliverables 5x times faster and with orders of magnitude in value addition, than your typical NoCode expert.
Here are 5 pointers that can help you accelerate your organization’s No-Code application development.
1. Planning up-front is key
NoCode technologies are enablers, not magic wands. The decision to adopt No-Code within your organization also means product owner’s planning and approach on NoCode application development must adapt to this change. Weekly NoCode development sprints can have up to 5-10x times more features and changes implemented in comparison to a normal one-week sprint w.r.t. coding based sprints. So it is very important that an organization is also well-prepared before every ‘(Super) Sprint’.
Poor planning and a slow responding organizational bureaucracy will adversely affect No-Code development speeds and end up under utilizing its potential. When done right, you can see results within a matter of days or even hours.
2. Address important ‘What’ questions for your application
Before you start with your No-Code application development, you should be clear on who your target users are and what exact problems you are solving for them. Don’t guess or decide for your target users, simply ask them whether your assumptions are right and get feedback on what tasks take they feel needs to be automated.
During development you can think of what features can become scalable in future and what user experience can bring the most productivity for your target users.
We have covered 8 important ‘What’ questions as quick reference cards. Download them here 👉 8 important 'WHAT' questions to consider while building your business applications
ℹ️ The best application development speeds we have achieved to deliver a fully functional web application with NoCode is just 40 hours including half a day of discussion. In this case, very clear and meticulously prepared deliverable requirement documentation from the product owners and our unique “Dutch NoCode Approach” made this possible.
3. Start with experts, then switch to new No-Code developers
Let’s be real. Any new technology or skill set takes time to get used to and to achieve expertise. You can read about it, watch youtube tutorials, get trained, etc. but, nothing beats the experience of a NoCode expert who built multitudes of NoCode applications. We always recommend to start working together with NoCode experts and learn their best practices, thought processes and approaches they use. They not only bring platform based in-depth knowledge, but also their vast experience working on several NoCode projects.
ℹ️ For a past Client of ours, one of our No-Code expert solved a No-Code application performance issue and rebuilt an entire business process flow within 16 hours that gave results in 2-3 seconds over hundreds of thousands of records. The same flow previously took two of their internal No-Code developers, almost 3 weeks to build and gave results only in 25-30 minutes!
4. Adapt to what is available
No-Code platforms are designed to build and deploy applications very fast. Well-established No-Code platforms always provide enough flexibility to build almost anything that is possible through coding based solutions.
But to also make sure that very fast development is possible, there is some give and take. Do your best to adapt with what is available within the selected No-Code platform.
ℹ️ During one of our trainings, I noticed that a NoCode developer with coding background was struggling to finish his No-Code assignments when others finished it very fast. The problem was, he saw an option to inject scripts inside the No-Code platform and started using it profusely. This meant that a button that was available as a drag-and-drop option which might have taken only a few seconds ended up being several minutes of coding challenges for him.
5. Dismantling & rebuilding is (sometimes) a good thing
Application development can quickly become big puzzle challenges if you are not careful, especially in the initial architecture designs. Restructuring and reconfiguring application functionalities and architectures using No-Code technology is a lot easier than traditional approach using coding. But this also ends up being misused by many product owners and developers alike.
During our trainings and consultancy work, we have seen several NoCode applications that are very rigid and made unnecessarily complex due to the assumption that NoCode is easy to maintain and reconfigure. As your NoCode application becomes complex, even small architectural design changes can drastically impact your application’s overall performance.
Especially for NoCode applications, since a lot of deliverables can be achieved even within a week, it is advisable to go through frequently used or updated features, user flows, data structure and querying logic. We recommend doing these revisits once a month or two for applications that have very frequent change requests and/or feature additions.
Footnote:
Digital solution features that took months or years to develop in the past can be now deployed in a matter of just days or weeks using NoCode. Now with the introduction of ChatGPT, who knows, your curious experimental NoCode project might end up as a strategic turning point for your business or a unicorn startup idea!
Related links:
5 Secrets to No-Code success
What is No-Code?
8 important 'WHAT' questions to consider while building your business applications - Download
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