Why has In-house Low Code now become feasible for an enterprise?

As previously described in What is Code Printing?, Low Code is a form of Code Printing which should be attractive to an enterprise, but has only been partially adopted because:

• Enterprises tend to prefer sovereignty over their code base
• Enterprises need to customise their code outcomes, which erodes the attraction of commercial platforms
• When they decide to exit a platform, they leave with No Code

But since enterprises will benefit the most from Low Code solutions, there must be a way to solve these constraints ... you'll be happy to know, there is!!

So what is it and how has become feasible?

The past ...

For some years elf has been providing code printed services for data migration, data maintenance and parallel runs for large and medium sized transformation programmes across the globe - from mid-market programmes taking less than a year up to Tier 1 programmes running for 3-4 years.

These services rely upon proprietary patterns and templates which work together to provide rapid, rich, cohesive and auditable data related outcomes.

Implementing these was justifiable due to:

• The volume of modules required for any single programme
• The savings in resources, time and effort for each programme
• The reusability of patterns across programmes for many clients and
• The substantial benefits that early population of target applications with real data can provide in:
  • Shifting left in validating solution decisions - at the earliest and cheapest possible time
  • Identifying process edge cases that would otherwise be missed
  • Providing early visibility and trajectory for legacy data quality

The templates and patterns have provided enormous value to our customer base during large, high pressure transformation programmes.

We refer to this platform as our Prototype Code Printing platform, because whilst it was fully functional for the patterns we implemented, it was not readily extensible to patterns unique to a customer beyond these Data Stream requirements, or for more patterns involving recursively complex sub-patterns.

We saw the enormous value of expanding Code Printing support beyond these proprietary patterns, but to make it feasible the effort relating to implementing new patterns and their design templates needed to be substantially reduced.

The present ...

So we undertook the task of building an enterprise information modelling and transformation platform which is:

Extensible

Readily models any type of information and complexity, supporting the modelling for any design configuration which may be required for printing pattern based code. This also means it can readily ingest and use information from existing enterprise knowledge sources, such as data structures, API and micro-service contracts, code etc.

Self Constructing

Prints API and UI/UX based on its own information model configuration which also enables configurable interaction with the models - to suit the design template process requirements for any code pattern. So there is very limited effort required to configure individual pattern related design processes.

Polymorphic

Any information model can be treated as or transformed into any other. That means a series of high level requirements can readily morph into a design configuration for pattern A, or a series of design configurations for pattern B ... and then some may be changed to pattern C, which may be an extension of pattern B.

Optimised for Code Printing

From the ground up every mote, which is the basic unit of knowledge in the platform, can be leveraged by transformation algorithms to:

• Initialise design configuration templates
• Become attributes of design configurations
• Be transformed into pattern based code artefacts.... readily support any level of complexity!

elf have begun to use it for client project acceleration with great success. For example our code printing team have recently:

• Delivered pattern changes to 100+ APIs in a day
• Transformed 300+ GoCD Bitbucket CI/CD pipelines to Azure DevOps in 2 weeks

Each example cuts code delivery times for the projects by at least an order of magnitude.

The rapid delivery timeframes have allowed time for evolution of the patterns, and where pattern changes have been required they are delivered 100% consistently within hours across all hundreds of code artefacts.

The future ...

mojoh.io

We see a future in which small IT organisations and small teams deliver change, value and enterprise agility beyond anything that is possible today with large teams.

The future of enterprise delivery is Code Printing and the platform that enables it is mojoh.io - please follow the link to join the community of early adopters or visit www.elfware.com or contact us to help turn around your IT project delivery today.

Also On The Blog

• What is Code Printing?
• How much complexity can Enterprise Low Code support?
• What is Low Code?