Using low-code in your SDLC can accelerate delivery by 85%

Software development leaders are trapped by their legacy. With an increasingly digitally native workforce and intuitive, robust coding tools, we must stop thinking about the software development life cycle (SDLC) as a linear function.

The availability of low-code, no-code, and GenAI tools is growing. Business and technology leaders have a unique opportunity to co-create software across teams using low-code to fulfill the promise of the Agile SDLC to transform their business operations.

The purpose of software is to enable employees to deliver on the firm’s goals

As a CIO or leader in your firm’s applications or software engineering teams, you’ve likely read The Unicorn Project by Gene Kim. Kim articulates the need for a technology organization to work closer to the business and become more agile, speeding the ability to innovate based on customer feedback and changing market conditions. The outcome of adopting low-code as a means of making coding user friendly can enhance employee and customer experiences while creating value for the company.

Firms continue developing custom code and workflows to create operational efficiencies and differentiate employee and customer experiences. Many firms adopt software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions to further augment how their teams adapt to market changes and provide workflow, data, and insights across applications, services, and platforms. Over the past two decades, businesses have become reliant on software to function, yet many firms continue to see their technology efforts struggle to keep up with business demand.

Adopt low-code-based solutions to help your teams collaborate more effectively and realize innovation

In The Unicorn Project, Kim says, “A healthy software [development process] is one that you can change at the speed you need, where people can contribute easily, without jumping through hoops.” This sentiment echoes the findings of a recent HFS study in Exhibit 1, where an equal mix of business and technology leaders agreed that the best way to get the most value from low-code was to ensure it allowed the faster delivery of prototypes. In other words: Get the innovation out of people’s heads and into a team’s hands!

Exhibit 1: To enable business outcomes, software development must allow firms to transform ideas into products and constantly improve employee productivity

Sample: n=150 business and technology decision makers, Fortune 500 firms
Source: HFS Research, 2023

With the ability for business and technology teams to co-develop new functionality, the teams using the software can boost their productivity while improving the outcomes associated with fulfilling their daily jobs. Firms can reap the rewards by adopting low-code solutions and engaging with software development partners that can help them innovate by replacing legacy systems with more intuitive software development tools, like low-code.

As part of its ongoing research, HFS interviewed a large European financial customer that indicated low-code tools are being well-received as part of its SDLC. Adding visualization to the coding practice makes it easier for the IT organization to meet business stakeholders’ goals and deliver solutions with speed and continuous improvement cycles as a standard practice.

For businesses needing to define outcomes for their low-code investments, HFS recommends using metrics comparing current software development time against the impact of low-code internally and with partners. Determine if low-code development leads to a reduction in time-to-market on projects. Assess where users and lines of business are acquiring solutions outside of the IT department and, by using low-code, measure the reduction of shadow IT costs. To gain an employee experience perspective, survey whether there are improvements in culture as collaboration efforts between business and software teams improve.

Adding no-code and generative coding tools is the final step in breaking away from linear SDLC projects

Services firms have been applying low-code expertise to expedite software development in their customers’ hybrid IT architectures. However, with SaaS solutions and the emergence of generative AI-based prompt engineering (as HFS calls generative coding), visual and language-based code creation further empowers both IT and the business. The resulting faster feedback loops are a boon for software engineering teams. Without these tools, companies will likely continue to follow the traditional SDLC in Exhibit 2 and struggle to match competitors’ speed, creativity, and adaptability.

Exhibit 2: The traditional SDLC is a linear path that can offer consistency, but it may not adapt as fast as business needs change

Source: HFS Research, 2023

HFS believes introducing multiple coding platforms, including traditional “pro code” (such as C++, Java, or SAP’s ABAP), low-code, and generative coding, enhances software development capabilities by improving the employees’ experience and ability to improve how they work. Further, each coding platform benefits the SDLC (see Exhibit 2) in multiple ways, and all of these can align the business and technology teams to achieve their desired outcomes.

A software development toolkit incorporating all these coding platforms is the crux for rethinking the linear nature of the SDLC. Rather than each step of the SDLC depending upon the business’ submitted requirements, the stages of the SDLC can be a collaborative effort between software developers, business teams, and services companies. Each uses different coding types to design, develop, test, deploy, and constantly assess business outcomes.

Exhibit 3: Rethinking the tools you use in the software delivery life cycle can speed delivery and time to value

Source: HFS Research, 2023

Adopting the Agile mindset enables business leaders to take advantage of all the assets at their disposal. A digitally fluent workforce will be engaged by working closely as lines between technology and business finally cease to exist. Further, selecting partners for software engineering services, software or applications development, or managed SaaS services will be based not on time and materials for engineering services but rather on the skills, partnerships, and frameworks they can bring to collaborate. We encourage CIOs and their business partners to seek thought leadership from their engineering partners about incorporating the best of the pro-code, low-code, no-code, and generative coding practices into the software development lifecycle.

The Bottom Line:  Firms must rethink their SDLC and allow their software development team and business users to co-innovate to drive growth and outcomes.

With 85% of firms seeking to use tools that can expedite how they want to work into how they are working, HFS predicts successful firms will adopt an agile SDLC. By moving beyond linear software development models, enterprise leaders can more effectively adopt the right tool for the right job and significantly improve their speed in implementing new software, enabling SaaS solutions, bringing more data to the business, and allowing cross-functional teams to collaborate more effectively. Further, they can engage with their IT services partners to collaborate, train, and leverage pro-code, low-code, no-code, and generative coding services and achieve a highly functional OneOffice™ model.