Introduction

In today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape, enterprises often find themselves burdened by the weight of technical debt—an accumulation of legacy systems, outdated processes, and inefficient workflows. Indeed, 69% of Global IT leaders consider technical debt as one of the biggest threats to innovation, and 64% agree that it will significantly impact the business in the coming days.

After all, 52 % of Global Technology investments are for maintaining existing systems, attributing to accumulated technical debt. However, Low-code Application Platforms [LCAP]’s emergence offers a powerful solution to mitigate and optimize technical debt. These platforms enable you to streamline and modernize your software development processes. While accelerating application development, Low-code/No-code Application Platforms minimize the long-term cost and complexity of traditional coding methods.

Thus, Low-code Application Platforms are invaluable tools for achieving technical debt optimization, fostering agility, and future-proofing operations in this digital transformation era. Gartner projects the worldwide market for Low-code-based development technologies to reach $26.9 billion in 2023, an increase of 19.6% from 2022.

Technical debt measures the expenses of revising a solution chosen for its ease of implementation despite limited capabilities. The most significant consequence of accumulating technical debt is its detrimental impact on a company’s competitive edge and innovation potential. It depletes valuable resources, consumes time and energy, and hinders the ability to innovate, adapt, and expand.

If identifying and managing technical debt is challenging, evading it is even more difficult.

Technical debt frequently arises from a lack of comprehensive user insights, the urgency to prioritize rapid deployment at the expense of quality, and insufficient attention to code quality. Here are some of the most pertinent causes of technical debt:

Time Constraints: The pressure of time frequently drives development teams to launch applications that may lack critical features or capabilities, sometimes compromising performance and overall quality in a rush to market.

Regular Change: Even when delivered on schedule, sometimes fully-featured applications may launch in the marketplace as outdated solutions. Increasing customer demands, emerging market prospects, evolving cybersecurity risks, and developer turnover often create continuous hurdles for IT leaders.

Obsolete technology: In building modern applications, developers often rely on various coding languages, developer frameworks, and libraries, some of which may become outdated or unsupported each year. Today’s Python could quickly transform into tomorrow’s Visual Basic.

Now that we have looked at the reasons for technical debt let us understand the benefits of a Low-code platform in application development that eventually might lead to technical debt management.

Be it business users crafting an app independently or simplifying the development process for coders through automated tasks, the Low-code Application Platform ensures quick setup and deployment. Here are some of the benefits of Low-code Application Development Platforms:

Better Agility: A low-code Application Platform provides more digital agility, helping develop app functionalities that ensure seamless user experiences across various devices and ensuring equal accessibility to data, collaboration tools, and apps on both smartphones and desktop PCs.

Cost Effective: Low-code Application Platforms enable you to develop more apps quickly, thus reducing expenses. However, that’s not all. These platforms diminish the necessity for additional developers, thus curbing recruitment expenditures.

Enhanced Customer Experience: Low-code-based application development goes beyond IT. The speedy development enhances the customer experience by enabling swift responses to market shifts and evolving customer needs.

Risk Management: With constantly evolving regulations at a global scale, compliance can be challenging for your organization. Low-code application platform-based development enables rapid adaptation, ensuring timely compliance with regulatory requirements.

Easy Deployment of Changes: Low-code application platform-based development simplifies app modifications, effortlessly adapting them to new needs. It eliminates the need for intricate coding, enabling swift adjustments when necessary.

After all, Low-code application platforms automate updates, cutting operational costs and freeing the development team from technical debt management. Consequently, it leads to faster, leaner development cycles with reduced waste and improved maintainability.

If you’re looking for a sustainable solution for technical debt management, you must embrace Low-code and application modernization.

When addressing technical debt, it’s essential to strike a balance between time, quality, and cost while considering the governance model, toolset, and mindset of your software development team. Achieving the correct blend in this equation is critical, and although not the sole factor, the appropriate technology can also play a significant role.

As per McKinsey’s findings, companies that diligently manage technical debt can reduce it significantly, ranging from a 25% to a remarkable 75% reduction. Let’s see how Low-code Application Platforms help you manage technical debt:

LCAP fosters collaboration between business and IT teams, yielding optimal solutions when business users and developers jointly design applications. It simplifies collaboration and encourages consistent, valuable input from business users.

LCAP expedites application development while maintaining high standards. It enables development at a remarkable speed, 10 to 20 times faster than conventional methods, freeing teams to focus on creating the optimal solution while offloading the coding to the platform.

LCAP addresses the integration challenge substantially minimizing overhead and maintenance. Robust low-code automation platforms consolidate all elements into a unified workflow, encompassing human workers, artificial intelligence (AI), robotic process automation (RPA), external tools, legacy systems, and data, all while preserving data integrity.

LCAP based applications are notably easier to maintain and do not contribute to the IT team’s workload or technical debt upon deployment. Maintenance is simplified, with the platform automatically managing upgrades, security certifications, regulatory compliance, and performance enhancements.

Additionally, Low-code Application Platforms also help accelerate digital transformation. Check how we accelerate the digitization of banks in India equipped by our Low-code Center of Excellence.

Technical debt poses a significant challenge for organizations worldwide, straining essential resources for developing competitive capabilities. In an increasingly digital world, this issue may intensify. Taking preventive measures is far more advantageous than resorting to remedies. Hence, the earlier you begin mitigating the adverse effects of technical debt on your project, the sooner you can remain competitive in a constantly changing market. Given the ever-shifting market landscape, you cannot afford to be held back by outdated code.

So, if you are looking for the right LCAP partner with a Center of Excellence to help you fight technical debt and stay ahead of the curve, Conneqt with us. Our focused LCAPs are Outsystems, Pega, Appian, and Microsoft Power App.