The Early Fascination with Building
As a child, I was always fascinated by cars, boats, airplanes, and more. I loved to build them but they had little functionality. The wheels of my toy cars could rotate with a simple axle, and the rotor of my dream helicopter could spin in unison with the wheel movement.
I once stumbled upon a magazine advertising kits for building boats and airplanes. This discovery was a revelation — could I really build a fully functional airplane? The idea was powerful. It made me feel an immense sense of freedom, as if I had wings and could fly. That moment shaped my belief that building things should be easy and attainable for everyone.
The State of Software Development Today
After decades in software development, I strongly believe we have yet to fully leverage our expertise to simplify software creation — we still spend valuable time writing code for basic CRUD operations. These lower level details should be abstracted out and presented as features inside of tools and made available as pluggable building blocks generic enough for any database/storage technology. Things become more complicated when we talk about business logic. Everything has to be custom built when it comes to enterprise applications. Not that there are no tools in the market today but the tools are either way too simplistic or overtly complex and need someone with good technology skills to use and produce enterprise software. For citizen developers, non tech founders, solopreneurs and also for business analysts in larger organizations, the tools that can help them meet their needs are very limited. I am in no way implying that software industry is not complex. On the contrary, software technology is way too complex with applications in every business domain. For example, automobile engineering is limited in scope and application to automobiles only. But software industry is wide open for use in almost all industries, businesses, politics, research and almost every human endeavor. It is almost infrastructural in usage that every business or organization needs software.
We place immense demands and high expectations on the software industry. While we continuously develop software for every niche and industry, we often overlook the need for frameworks and tools that simplify software creation for everyone. We have yet to reach a point where building software is as effortless as assembling LEGO pieces or kits to construct a house, a car, or an airplane. It’s an ambitious goal — but one I firmly believe is within our reach.
There are many Low Code No Code tools available in the market today that are trying to do this same exact thing. Some are way too simple while others are overtly complex and need a deep learning curve. We should be able to build a fully functional enterprise software that is secure, highly scalable and highly performant using a Low Code No Code Platform. We should not accept anything less. This will help in quick digitization of domains, areas and geographies that lack digitization. The increased technology adoption and penetration will help free ourselves of tasks and activities that are mundane and propel us to be more creative and efficient.
Every business application has a CRUD layer and the business functionality is built on top of it. Depending on the complexity of the business logic, these CRUD operations alone can take up anywhere from 50% to 90% of a developer’s time. While we should account for the CRUD operations in a No Code Platform which is perhaps a simpler problem, the Low Code aspect of the platform should provide easy pluggable logic to a system built on it. This will help organizations to build software quickly at a lower cost and at the same time allow citizen developers and business analysts to be able to help build and be part of the software development process. The complex aspects can be left for seasoned developers to tackle. With this approach, organizations can digitize almost every area of their operations. End to end digitization is always a dream for every organization while the reality is that most depend on manual and people processes to do things that are not seen as important. Organizations build systems for processes that give the most ROI but the other ancillary and supplementary processes are not prioritized for digitization. These processes are also equally important as they do impact the important processes indirectly or impact human and other resources associated with the important revenue generating processes.
Limitations of No Code and Low Code Solutions
Many No Code and Low Code tools assist with CRUD operations but fail to scale effectively. Solutions built on No Code Platforms generally have issues with scaling, security and often go through many changes to tackle the inadequate underlying foundations. When it comes to business functionality, there are very few tools offering an easy build and integration of APIs seamlessly preserving the architectural guidelines intact. A good Low Code No Code Platform should offer more than just a working prototype or a basic product that needs revisions as the application needs and usage grows.
Many Business Rule Engines do fill in this gap and other similar tools exist, but they generally address only simple system behaviors. In my experience, I have yet to see a No Code or Low Code platform that:
Is easy to learn and adopt for citizen developers, business analysts, or super users.
Provides a scalable, high-performance architecture leveraging the cloud.
Allows for custom functionality beyond simple CRUD operations.
Allows for best security practices like RBAC and ensures industry standards are met to address privacy and security guidelines.
Simplifies or completely eliminates build and deployment.
Is easily extensible and simplifies change management
Most tools today focus on one or a combination of task management, workflows, and collaboration features — helpful for productivity but insufficient for enterprise-level application development. Businesses still need to write extensive code to implement logic, making software development expensive and time-consuming.
The Need for a Holistic Solution
Enterprise software development requires a tool that allows businesses to:
Easily build and modify software on the fly.
Provide a secure, well-architected system with custom functionality.
Be intuitive for business users to build without requiring advanced technical knowledge.
Provide features for task management, workflows etc. as a standard feature set and build CRUD and business logic on top of it.
Scale seamlessly without any external intervention with options to manually override any infrastructural/cloud features.
Unfortunately, no existing No Code or Low Code platform fully meets these needs. Most demand a steep learning curve with complex configurations and unused features. Any new tool in this space should empower developers to focus on complex business logic instead of struggling with the platform itself.
Designing a Better Solution
After spending 27 years in continuous employment, I finally had the time and opportunity in the past six months (thanks to my position moving to offshore) to deeply reflect on this problem. I wasn’t starting from scratch — I had been experimenting with similar ideas for years, aiming to simplify enterprise software development with minimal coding (or no coding at all) while ensuring full customization.
Understanding the Core Concepts: Tasks and Workflows
At the heart of my solution lies a simple yet powerful idea: the concept of a task. Every profession involves tasks — from CEOs to entry-level employees, from doctors to engineers. Consider the following examples:
Healthcare: A doctor diagnosing a patient is a task. They might assign a task to a lab technician for a blood test, who then generates a lab report — another task.
HR & Recruitment: The process of onboarding an employee, from interviews to the first day at work, consists of multiple interconnected tasks.
IT Support: An ISP customer calls about an internet issue. A Level 1 technician logs the request, an expert analyzes it, and a field technician resolves it — all structured as tasks.
Business Processes and Workflows as the Foundation of Enterprise Systems
Tasks are grouped into processes to manage work efficiently. A business process is a collection of tasks stitched together to achieve a business function. A workflow will ensure the tasks or steps in a process are performed in a pre-defined order by notifying the participants of actions by other participants and if their task is due next. Workflows eliminate the burden of manual coordination and are instead automated helping in increased efficiencies.
Examples of business processes include:
Employee Onboarding: Covers interviews, offer approvals, document submission, and induction.
Agile Development: A user story that involves estimation, coding, and testing.
Customer Support: Handling an ISP issue, escalating as needed, and resolving it with field support.
You must have come across many workflows in modern productivity tools. These tools incorporate workflows but often limit them to email triggers or notifications. In reality, workflows are far more powerful and should be central to any enterprise system.
Large companies integrate workflow engines to streamline operations as an after-thought after the systems are already built. Instead, workflows should be part of the core platform feature set fully integrated from day one. This will ensure a smooth progression of the business process landscape as it evolves and adapts to the constantly changing business needs and market conditions.
What a Future-Ready System Should Offer
An ideal system should:
Model all business processes efficiently reflecting actual business operations and the Process Hierarchies/Dependencies.
Design all workflows tying all operations from end to end providing visibility and transparency into every operation.
CRUD and Business Logic should be built on top of the BPM Layer
Support rapid changes to business process models and workflows while ensuring backward compatibility.
Retain historical data with accurate business process tracking.
Offer built-in analytics to optimize operations and remove bottlenecks.
Enable seamless data integration with data warehouses and data lakes for BI by leveraging real-time event brokers.
Bringing It All Together
The future of No Code and Low Code solutions lies in empowering businesses to build and modify enterprise software effortlessly, without sacrificing security, scalability, or performance. A true game-changer will place workflows at the core, giving businesses the ability to build complex systems with minimal effort while ensuring flexibility and efficiency.
This is the vision I’ve been working towards — a platform that makes enterprise software development intuitive, scalable, and adaptable and more importantly extremely easy to build and change. Anyone and everyone who understands the business process landscape should be able to build it. If you are a Non Tech Founder or a Solopreneur, it should help you build a SaaS product quickly without understanding the underlying technologies. For larger companies, it should help digitize complex processes and build massive systems helping in increased efficiencies and time / cost savings.
The platform should walk the BPM Architect (or a Citizen Developer / Superuser / Business Analyst) through setting up Business Processes and Workflows, adding data fields for CRUD operations etc. by asking questions and helping build the solution quickly. The system should be ready to use right away without having to build it and deploy. This will provide an amazing user experience as the system is fully functional in minutes. All of the additional project management, routing and analytics features should be made available without having a Process Architect (or Citizen Developer) spend extra time configuring these features.
Now, let us go through the platform I created and see how these features are implemented. Here are some examples of what I have built on my Low Code No Code Platform. This is in no way a full demo but rather some important aspects to consider in such an undertaking.
An Agile Software Development Business Process Suite
Here is an example everyone in IT domain can relate to. The important processes in agile software development methodology include Epic, Story, Retrospective, Scrum, Initiative etc. All of these processes store data and form part of workflows and can optionally trigger other tasks and processes for build, deployment and are inter-related to each other in some way or another. Each task/activity and process should have customizable status and file upload capabilities. All of these are available on this platform.
The user story has individual steps and each step is performed separately one after the other as a workflow. Once a step or task is marked completed, it will trigger the next step status change to indicate the next step is ready to be worked on. The above screenshot shows the very first step in the process. Once the Story details are available, a developer can code it. Once the developer finishes coding and marks it completed, it can be tested by another member of the team who has an assigned task for this as shown on his/her dashboard. The workflow based system should represent this idea clearly as shown above. And there are data fields that capture all information for every step. In addition to specific data fields for this step, there are other generic fields as shown for marking status/ETA/estimates etc. I will skip those details and other complex areas and keep it simple to help understand the core concepts.
If you noticed above, the business function, data and workflows are all intertwined in the same screen. This is done to ensure that workflows and task management are part of the business function itself and do not need to be recorded in separate systems. To record it separately becomes an extra step and costs extra time and effort. Business users are not fond of spending extra time just to record the status and effort it took. It is generally an overhead for project managers and supervisors to coordinate among upper management and the workforce just to produce status reports! A system offering work estimations, status updates etc. as part of the business system itself helps employees manage their work easily without having to use additional systems and provide transparency in their work without having to spend additional time for it.
Let us look at another step from this same process — the last step in the process. This is performed by a Product Owner and the task is assigned to John Davis who is the PO on the scrum team. Once the PO accepts and marks the task or step complete, the dashboard clears automatically and this task is no longer displayed in the active tasks dashboard for John. As this is the last step in the story process, a new process like Deployment for DevOps team will be automatically triggered if configured. New tasks will be visible to DevOps team members automatically.
Please note all of this can be custom built and configured accordingly in a matter of a few hours. Our example is for an Agile SDLC Methodology. It can easily be done for any other business domain. However, the system supports scrum/agile/Kanban features so any business domain can leverage these agile practices. I built the whole process suite including all processes and workflows and establishing all roles and many scrum teams. All of this took me less than 2 days of work on this No Code Platform! What you are seeing is just a few screens, but there are many dashboards and other screens that support task assignments, automated workflows routing work to members who have capacity to do the work (estimation and routing module) etc. There are Kanban boards, Gaant charts, self-cleaning task and process dashboards for team members who are active task participants and for managers who supervise all tasks and activities. While the system provides transparency, it also ensures only users who have access to the actual processes will be able to access this data. A user may just have an observer-level or read-only access or can be an active participant/performer or a reviewer or approver. The workflow will adjust accordingly by sending tasks to reviewers and approvers via status changes.
Let us see some more example screens — here is my dashboard for all tasks. Please note I am part of many processes and only I can see these as I am assigned a role in each of these processes. A manager who is assigned access can see what I am assigned and also other team members’ workload, capacity, status etc.
Creating a workflow based process is so easy on this platform that my daughter built a process for her sister’s birthday and assigned me tasks! She also invited Batman and Ironman as attendees.
This addresses No Code CRUD screens for all business processes modeled as workflows. How about Low Code for adding custom behavior ? We just need a small change in each of these screens to be able to call APIs on the click of a button — it should be able to send data on the screen via a HTTP API and the developer can code the API that sends data back accordingly.
The Save and Close are standard buttons. Let us add a search button that calls an API for a Customer Engagement in a CRM system for a Real Estate Agency. The results will populate other fields when a result is found, else a message is shown. Building a CRM system is a one-day affair on my platform!
So far, we did not see any setup screens — there are many but here is the one helping us to add a button to integrate with an external API.
And here is the resulting screen with the Customer Search button placed exactly where we said in the control render order.
There are over 40 screens with many dashboards, analytics and project management features. There are many screens for setting up workflows, building processes etc. But more importantly, the system has the CRUD screens that you can create and update on the fly and can integrate your APIs easily for a fully customized business logic. Since building enterprise software is made so easy on this platform, why not digitize each and every activity and build BPM solutions for the whole enterprise? Model all business processes and operations for every department from end-to-end. You can set up teams and manage work by assigning to teams directly and someone from the team will be assigned tasks depending on who has capacity to accept work. Building software today should not cost you a fortune and should instead be something that anyone can build easily. It should be easily extensible and maintainable. Hope you enjoyed understanding what it means to build a Low Code No Code Platform for the enterprise. It has been a fun activity for me building this platform and trying to solve one of the most complex problems for digitizing the enterprise. I would appreciate any feedback and comments. If you like to get in touch, feel free to email me — anjum.vaseem@gmail.com.
Vaseem Anjum
https://www.linkedin.com/in/vaseem-anjum-07514a7/
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