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Low-code application development

What does “low-code” mean?

Low-code development has been described by Forrester as "Products and/or cloud services for application development that employ visual, declarative techniques instead of programming" This is exactly what Pega has been doing for 30 years  creating Software That Writes Your Software™.

As you manipulate and expand the visual model, the low-code development tools create the code for you. User interface capabilities such as drag-and-drop, process flows, and visual tools allow anyone, regardless of technical ability, to create transformational software. This approach enables increased productivity, as everyday app development tasks are streamlined, lessening IT involvement. Low-code tools make application development simpler.

The value of a low-code approach

The ability to create powerful software is vital to organizations as the need for rapid transformation outpaces the traditional one-size-fits-all approach where large teams of developers build proprietary solutions. Low-code application development platforms help bridge the gap between business stakeholders and skilled developers, creating a common visual language to collaborate more effectively. Teams working with low-code tools are more agile, deliver value more rapidly, and work with stakeholders more effectively. Collaborating with stakeholders in a common visual language allows you to focus on explaining the business logic rather than the code. With shortened feedback loops, teams become more productive, freeing limited resources to tackle the ever-expanding backlog of projects.

Building with low-code tools

Many users think that a simple, easy to understand visual development tool is limited to creating very simple applications, on par with something you could implement in a spreadsheet. Pega's low-code platform can be used to create very robust applications in a myriad of channels. For example, the marketing team used a shared spreadsheet to capture and track requests. Using Pega’s low-code tools, they built an email and web-based request system, with reporting for request visibility, notifications for collaboration, and SLA tracking to ensure that work got done on time.

Pega's low-code technology allows you to build an application that captures data and initiates business processes. What might surprise you is the application can be a web page, a mobile application, or a chatbot that interacts with your client over Facebook messenger. Information can be extracted from an incoming email, or a robot pulling data from other software solutions. The power of Pega's low-code technology allows you to create an application where you can interact with your users in the channel of their choice. With omni-channel development capabilities, organizations can unify their development activities for all the required channels rather than maintain disparate lines of code.

Users are a great source for data, but often, the data that is needed is located in another system. Through a visual interface, Pega empowers users to build integrations to these systems to obtain the data necessary to drive the process forward. Pega assists users by graphically mapping data into their application for a holistic view of the data landscape.

Low-code and developers

Pega's visually-driven, end-to-end application development tools make everyone more productive — citizen developers and professional developers alike. While low-code enables the non-developer to create application code, it also enables the experienced developer to write code more rapidly and effectively.

To enable citizen developers with additional functionality to meet your organizational needs, Pega's application development studios enables developers to dive deeper into the Pega Platform to craft a solution to the business problem, hiding the implementation, and visualizing the business logic for others to consume. With patterns for reuse and extension built into the Pega platform, developers can build a solution once and leverage it many times throughout the entire ecosystem.


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