How To Use Low-Code Across The Five Stages Of The Agile Development Lifecycle

Agile development is a systematic and strategic approach to application or software development. Agile development is primarily focused on consistent feedback and improvement through each stage of the development process. The agile development cycle typically consists of 5 distinct stages; ideation, development, testing, deployment and operations and maintenance.

Recent advancements in low-code technology now mean that the agile development lifecycle can be significantly accelerated, streamlined and optimized. The wide variety of benefits of low-code development platforms can be implemented at each stage of the agile development lifecycle. Recent studies have shown that low-code application development platforms have the potential to reduce overall development time by up to 90%.

Therefore, modern, agile development teams must be aware of how to implement low-code technology into each stage of the agile development lifecycle.

How To Integrate Low-Code Across the Agile Development Lifecycle:

1) Ideation

Recent studies have shown that building a robust and agile organizational culture in any organization could potentially increase commercial performance by up to 237%. However, it is crucial to prioritize the ideation step to ensure that agile development projects are profitable. Ideation is the foundation of any successful agile development project and lifecycle. Through careful ideation processes, your business can provide stakeholders, departments, employees and prospective customers with a comprehensive overview of the benefits of an agile development project. The ideation process can also help businesses create a holistic vision for their product or service, make changes when required and satisfy consumer expectations much more effectively.

The ideation process for agile development projects typically involves defining the purpose of the project, prioritizing specific development tasks, determining organizational and user requirements and allocating resources. Low-code platforms can help agile developers automate various time-consuming aspects of development, hence enabling scarce organizational resources to be allocated to more crucial development processes. Furthermore, since low-code can help eliminate various human errors, resources allocated to re-coding processes can be allocated to more important tasks.

2) Development

Once the ideation process has been completed, agile development teams often shift their focus to the development process. The development process involves organizing and dividing development tasks, building various iterations, building a scope document and much more. This process also often involves tasks such as the development of user interfaces and designs, data architecture and refinement of user experiences.

The development process is typically the longest stage of the agile development lifecycle due to complex coding procedures. However, low-code development platforms can significantly accelerate and streamline the development stage by providing businesses with powerful features such as user-friendly drag-and-drop tools, pre-configured templates and user interface designs and automation technology.

Low-code can also enable agile developers to create powerful enterprise applications in substantially less time, which not only helps eliminate various repetitive, time-consuming aspects of development but can also enable developers to work on higher-level, more intellectually stimulating development processes.

3) Testing

The testing process is an extremely crucial part of the agile development lifecycle. All enterprise applications and software must be thoroughly tested and evaluated before they can be implemented. The testing stage is a continuous process of constant correction, where agile developers undergo various quality assurance tasks.

Agile teams must evaluate each iteration of an application or software for erroneous code, human errors, implementation of troubleshooting facilities and more. These testing processes can help agile development teams identify and address hidden faults with the source code before they are deployed.

However, testing each application iteration can be an extremely complex and time-consuming process. Therefore, low-code application development platforms can enable agile development teams to test enterprise application iterations rapidly, with minimal time delays. Low-code platforms can also enable developers to take advantage of instant troubleshooting tools, hence providing businesses with the ability to resolve prevailing issues much faster than ever before.

4) Deployment

Once agile developers have completed the development and testing process, it is time to release the application. The deployment stage is primarily dependent on how effective the agile development team’s ideation processes were. During this stage, development teams can determine how the application should be deployed. An effective deployment process can also enable businesses to streamline and optimize various other aspects of the agile development lifecycle such as consequent product development, bug fixes and maintenance.

Low-code platforms can enable agile development teams to build and deploy applications and software in significantly less time than traditional development processes. Therefore, low-code development can enable businesses to automate and streamline workflows with unprecedented ease. Low-code platforms can also allow users to deploy numerous powerful applications as well as redeploy them as many times as necessary. This means that the agile development cycle can be significantly shortened but can also enable developers to redeploy them multiple times to ensure that the application fits your business’s expectations, requirements and preferences.

5) Operations and Maintenance

The last step in the agile development lifecycle is ongoing maintenance to identify potential bug fixes, updates, post-deployment problems and other potential methods to improve operational performance. This step is also crucial for ensuring that the application is satisfying the same functionality and performance level initially projected during the ideation stage. This stage is essential for improving user experiences and hence improving overall organizational performance. Over time, agile development teams may be able to identify potential areas of improvement or source code errors.

Low-code development can help increase troubleshooting speed, automate end-to-end workflows and empower agile teams to streamline critical application maintenance processes.

Planet Crust – Integrate Low-Code Into Agile Development:

Agile approaches to software and application development are now more popular than ever before. Agile development has numerous potential benefits such as reduced risk, project transparency, increased customer satisfaction and much more. However, agile development projects can often be extremely time-consuming if conducted using traditional application development approaches. Therefore, it can be extremely beneficial for your business to implement and integrate low-code technology into each stage of the agile development lifecycle.

Corteza, created by Planet Crust, is an open-source low-code platform that is the perfect tool to help your business incorporate low-code into agile development processes. Corteza allows users to connect to build, iterate and deploy an unlimited number of applications, connect to numerous third-party data sources, design and manage complex business processes, integrate data between various applications and much more.

Try a trial now so that your business can take advantage of the wide variety of benefits of low-code technology for optimizing and streamlining the agile development lifecycle.