5 Stages Of The Agile Low-Code Development Lifecycle

Agile development is a systematic and strategic approach to software or application development. Agile development primarily focuses on continuous feedback and improvement through every stage of the development process. The Agile low-code development cycle usually consists of five stages: ideation, development, testing, deployment, operations, and maintenance.

Recent advancements in low-code technology mean that the agile development cycle can be significantly expedited, streamlined, and optimized. The extensive variety of benefits of low-code platforms can be implemented at every stage of the agile development cycle. Recent studies have shown that low-code app development platforms have the ability to reduce overall development time by up to 90%.

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

Integration Of Low-Code Across The Agile Development Lifecycle

Ideation

Recent studies have shown that building a strong and agile organizational culture in any organization could potentially boost commercial performance by up to 237%. However, it is important to prioritize the ideation to ensure that agile development projects are profitable. Through a careful Ideation process, your business can provide departments, stakeholders, employees, and potential customers with a complete overview of the benefits of an agile development project. The ideation process can help businesses create a holistic vision for their service or product. This can also help them make changes when required, and satisfy customer expectations more effectively.

The ideation process of Agile low-code development projects usually involves defining the purpose of the project, prioritizing certain development tasks, determining user and organizational requirements, and allocating resources. Low-code platforms can assist agile developers to automate multiple time-consuming aspects of development. Hence, they enable limited organizational resources to be allocated to more important development processes. Moreover, since low-code can help remove multiple human errors, resources allocated to re-coding processes can be allocated to more crucial tasks.

Agile Low-Code Development

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

The development process is usually the biggest stage of the Agile low-code development lifecycle due to complicated coding procedures. However, low-code platforms can significantly expedite and streamline the development stage by providing businesses with effective features. These features may be pre-configured templates and user interface designs, user-friendly drag-and-drop tools, and automation technology.

Low-code can also enable agile developers to make powerful enterprise applications in significantly less time. It not only helps eliminate multiple repetitive, time-consuming aspects of development but can also enable developers to work on greater-level, more intellectually stimulating development processes.

Testing

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

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

However, testing each app iteration can be an extremely complic and time-consuming process. Therefore, low-code platforms can enable agile development teams to test enterprise app iterations quickly, with minimal time delays. Low-code platforms can also enable developers to benefit from instant troubleshooting tools. Hence, they make businesses able to resolve prevailing problems much faster than before.

Deployment

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

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

Operations And Maintenance

The last step in the agile development lifecycle is continuous maintenance to identify potential updates, bug fixes, post-deployment issues, and other potential methods to increase operational performance. This step is also important to ensure that the application is satisfying the same functionality and performance level primarily projected during the ideation stage. This stage is crucial to improve user experience, hence increasing overall organizational performance. Over time, agile teams can identify potential areas of improvement or source code errors.