NoCode Warm-up Series: Are you ready?

The rise of NoCode is one of the strongest technology trends in 2019. It has begun to change the way of building web and mobile applications, and allows everyone to become a Builder. On July 6, 2020, Amazon AWS launched its own NoCode platform, the Amazon Honeycode service. This article is the beginning of the NoCode warm-up series. It will discuss the problems that NoCode solves, the background of its birth, and common application areas.

Current new confusion: Lean but not thin enough

In 2011, Eric Ries published "Lean Startup" based on his work experience in several start-up companies in Silicon Valley. The core idea is to first put a minimal prototype product (Minimum Viable Product, referred to as MVP) in the market, and then through continuous learning and valuable user feedback, rapid iterative optimization of the product, in order to adapt to the market as soon as possible to reduce risks , To avoid the large amount of funds required for early planning.

In the past 10 years, lean methods have been widely used as a good medicine for product construction and company start-ups, but what has not changed so far is the nature of the composition of the software product team, because the design, development and implementation of new products require personnel with specific skills. In reality, almost every product team is composed of product managers, project managers/business analysts, designers, and development teams. Even the simplest viable product (MVP) usually still requires the cooperation of people in several roles, and it takes weeks to months to get it into the hands of customers. Moreover, finding people with these specific skills and getting them started quickly, or using outsourcing methods to complete the necessary steps, requires additional personnel costs and time periods. The market demand is fleeting, and it is likely to wait for the MVP to come out. But it didn't last.

Lean methods emphasize "using experiments to verify business hypotheses", which requires us to maintain an open attitude and focus on the best way to solve customer problems. Therefore, "make lean thinner" has become a new demand, that is, to shorten the time period from conception to MVP landing, and to efficiently experiment with continuous new ideas. Therefore, we need a new way to break the last hurdle of lean practice. However, we often hear this sentence in the entrepreneurial team: "As long as we can obtain some development resources, we can build the next unicorn startup." The reality is that the shortage of development talents will not change soon. .

Due to the continuous demand for applications and the shortage of skilled developers, this brings about the requirement of civilianization of development skills to ensure that ordinary people can more easily develop custom applications. NoCode is a new model that changes the rules of the game, and it is also a typical example of "everyone can become a Builder".

confirms the clues of the birth of the "new way" from history

Older IT partners often have this feeling. Many new things today can always find their clues in the history of IT development in the past. Let's go back briefly to the history of software to prove the eagerness of this "new way".

The software industry is actually relatively young, almost 60 years or so. The original plan focused on military and scientific needs, and commercial software appeared around 1960. From 1960 to the present, to sum up, there have been roughly four waves in the software industry.

The first wave of writing your own software (1960–1980)

In the 1960s, almost all software users were programmers. This is the golden age of true hackers. Want a new game? Write one yourself. Need a new programming language? Create one yourself.

NoCode has no meaning in the first wave. Why? Hackers can quickly write code and complete all the work required. This is not a good time to use NoCode tools.

The second wave of personal desktop software (1980–2000)

Business software began to develop. These hackers became entrepreneurs and started companies. Games, productivity software, and development tools are booming.

During this period, NoCode tools did appear, for example, spreadsheets were very popular. The NoCode tool made significant progress in the second wave, but it did not receive huge attention. Why? Because immediately after the third wave of the Internet began.

The third wave of Web collaboration software (2000-2015)

The Internet has changed everything, and more and more traditional businesses have gradually moved to the Internet and began to move to the cloud. The emergence of the cloud has released more freedom for entrepreneurs to focus on the business itself. Salesforce was founded in 1999, JIRA appeared in 2002, and Google Docs was released in 2006. Teams can write documents together, create business models together, make work plans and design interfaces together. Internet-driven collaborative software began to replace personal desktop software.

During this period, NoCode tools have been developed, such as electronic forms have been transferred to the Internet. However, Web development is not mature enough. We gradually learned how to use Javascript, invented React, and began to gradually use the new way of Web to realize the personal desktop software function that supports collaborative work mode. At this moment, NoCode still needs to grow technically and is not yet ready to officially launch it to users.

The fourth wave of creating your own NoCode software (2015 to present)

With the development of the Web, Web applications with complex expression functions have become a reality. The resulting NoCode tools and platforms have greatly reduced the time required to transform ideas into MVPs. It is no longer necessary to become a programmer before building products. This makes it possible for new changes from different industries and backgrounds.

Throughout the four waves of the software industry, the Internet has made great contributions. With the emergence of personal desktop software, the emergence of mobile Internet, the emergence of cloud services, the emergence of collaborative software, and the vigorous development of Web technology, it has laid the foundation for the arrival of the NoCode era. A solid foundation.

NoCode and its common scenarios

The emergence of NoCode enables non-technical personnel to use resources, obtain data, and build workflows to solve practical problems for users. As mentioned earlier, NoCode is not a new concept, but it reflects the future trend of the civilianization of development skills, that is, everyone can be a Builder. As AWS Senior Vice President Charlie Bell once mentioned: "If everyone can innovate quickly and efficiently, and things run smoothly, the world will become a better place, there is no doubt about that."

If a marketer can create and update a website, then he can continue to iterate and try various ideas of his own faster; if a consultant can automate his unique process as a tool within a few hours, then he can Solve customer problems faster and reflect the value of their efforts; if small business owners can build applications according to their own needs, they can increase business efficiency through automation and save valuable time to expand new businesses.

The emergence of NoCode, relying on the agility of mobile Internet and cloud services, with the help of gradually improving the expression of complex Web functions, and the easy-to-use visual interface, to realize the mobile and collaborative needs of users. Everyone can become a Builder, making lean and thinner. Let MVP get closer to users faster, achieve rapid trial and error and continuous iteration.

NoCode can provide seamless integrated Web workflow and data-driven application rules for any business. The following are 5 common application scenarios of NoCode in reality:

1. BI reports and dashboards

BI analysts or developers can use NoCode to access data in real time and transform it into insightful data grids, visualizations and key indicators. Whether dealing with sales data or project management data, real-time analysis can be used to make informed decisions.

2. Migrate legacy apps

The migration from traditional applications to modern systems is a difficult experience for programmers and managers. The NoCode platform can alleviate migration problems and reduce costs without the need to purchase ERP development and consulting services. The NoCode platform can make UX modern and more efficient. From configuration to elimination of coding, from testing to deployment, the entire migration process has become easier than ever.

3. Improve operational efficiency

Since business users can handle application development by themselves, and apply their skills to custom applications based on their industries and job functions, this can improve overall business operation efficiency, including supply chain management, invoice management, equipment tracking, and order management, etc. Wait.

4. Data management application

The data source can be connected to any database, such as MS SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc., and has the functions of editing, inserting, deleting and updating data. Business users can quickly and efficiently build their own database applications. Information collection, storage, sharing and collaboration have also become easier.

5. Business process application

Managers often spend a lot of time creating work business processes. With fast and intuitive drag-and-drop functions, NoCode has become the best tool for business workflow modeling.

This is the first chapter of the entire series. Later, the author will discuss in depth the content involved in the NoCode system – stay tune for next episode!

Author of this article

Huang Shuai
Amazon AWS professional services team cloud architecture consultant. Responsible for cloud architecture design and optimization, DevOps organization consulting and technical implementation for enterprise-level customers. He has many years of experience in architecture design, operation and maintenance, and team management in the field of software research and development, and has in-depth research and enthusiasm for DevOps, cloud-native microservice governance framework, containerized platform operation and maintenance, and chaos engineering practice.