Low-code, the revolution in software development that can further accelerate digitalization

This huge demand results in technological solutions will fundamentally shake up the software market and can turn practically anyone into a potential software developer.

The software industry today

One of the key driving forces of economic growth is technological advancement, which allows us to create ever more value with a single unit of work, capital and natural resources. The field of agriculture is a good example of this, which over a few thousand years has progressed from self-supporting family farming on small patches of land to a small number of manual laborers working on giant farms, working alongside engineers, including a fair number of IT specialists. Computer science is increasingly becoming present in all industries, from the financial sectors and the automotive industry to agriculture. This phenomenon is known as digital transformation. Over the next year, the IT expenditures of companies are expected to reach US$4 trillion, in which the acquisition and development of software is growing at the fastest rate of 8-9% (as opposed to the average 3-4%) approximating US$800 billion. (Source: Gartner)

Demand-driven market

Over the last quarter of a century, software development has quickly become one of the most common, sought after professions, not only in developed regions but also in countries such as India, Pakistan and China. Universities are producing a multitude of programmers, however there is still an unmet demand for these trained professionals. Initially, the migration of experts from Asia and Eastern Europe filled the labour gap in the Western world, but this was unable to lull the ravenous need for software developers world wide. The desperation of companies can be tangibly seen in the way salaries and work conditions are taking shape. Nowadays in Budapest, software development engineers can expect to receive a gross salary of HUF 600,000, while an experienced programmer can earn two or three times this amount without even taking on managerial duties (Source: Talentera). This is often combined with excellent work environments, with a list of facilities and amenities such as games rooms, masseuses and gym access, and of course, free coffee, fruit and pastries are a given. There may even be a separate team whose job it is to make the company as attractive as possible to employees.

Low-code

It’s no wonder that the market produced its own solution to the issue of a limited workforce – the vertical division of the software development process. In the low-code model, all the key architectural functions of applications, such as communication with the operating system, database management, managing users, the UI model, etc. are established on a productized platform. The lower levels of the future business application are not 'single-use products', but are rather manifested in a continuously optimized, perfectly refined code. It is typical for all low-code projects that the business logic is established at a much faster rate than in conventional, specialized software development projects. The exact nature of the competencies required by low-code application development is platform-dependent. Some tools function as a kind of development framework, their purpose is not to replace programmers, but merely to make their work easier. Some platforms only require a minimum of programming knowledge, and in fact, there are some which even require no programming competencies at all.