Speeding up software innovation? Explore the combined opportunities of low-code and business rules

The pace of innovation in modern business environments is rapidly accelerating. As an ISV, the time-to-market for new functionalities has become your most important competitive factor. And that is a challenge because the job market for software developers is rather tight, to say the least. So you will have to come up with a trick to bring new functionalities live faster and with the same number of developers. This is only possible by approaching your software development process differently.

Manage the complexity

You may have already done some research into low-code development platforms (LCDPs). These platforms enable you to generate an application from the drawn model, almost without having to write code. These platforms are very popular for developing front-end applications. They allow you to build the most beautiful portals and other web applications in a short amount of time. But they often fall short when it comes to building complex, rule-intensive back-end applications. The main reason: the model quickly becomes incredibly cluttered if many hundreds of rules have to work together.

IMVS director John Motley sums up why: “The value of our intellectual property is actually disproportionate to the number of developers we employ.”

Customize your application quickly

The solution to this problem lies in an LCDP that combines a model-driven approach with business rules. With business rules, you do not automate the how (not which steps should we take in which order to achieve something?), but the what (what should be the outcome of a process?). In a business rules engine, you record all business rules that are involved in a process. Will there be new laws and regulations that are going to force you to adjust the application?

Then all you have to do is change the business rules involved in that process, and you’re done. This makes the software much more manageable, and also more stable and flexible over a longer period of time, allowing your development team to focus on quickly bringing new functionalities live. Thanks to the low-code approach, they can do that about five times faster than if they had to write the code themselves.

Innovating faster

ISVs such as ResortSuite (a developer of hospitality software) and IMVS (a developer of software for asset managers) use low-code based on business rules to build and maintain a very comprehensive application with a small team. IMVS director John Motley sums up why: “The value of our intellectual property is actually disproportionate to the number of developers we employ.”

The original of this article can be read on the website of TechVisor

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