Do you need to be a developer to develop software?
The next generation of technology products, projects, and systems are being developed using data and artificial intelligence. Digital technologies – such as cloud, IoT, and blockchain – combined with data ecosystems can produce connected products that fully interact with users and environments. The complexity of these systems is enormous.
Consequently, the demand for highly skilled software developers continues to grow but so does the shortfall - estimated to be four million developers by 2025. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that almost 200,000 developer jobs will need filling each year through the end of the decade.
While this type of job demand presents an opportunity for developers to benefit from a booming job market, there is a downside. The work of software developers continues to increase in complexity, negatively countering the excitement many developers have for their work with burnout and resentment.
So, what is to be done? One approach is to reframe the problem. Rather than train more people to become highly skilled software developers, why not make highly skilled software development easier and more accessible to more people?
This is the idea behind low code. Low code builds applications and products faster and seamlessly integrates digital technologies. Gone are the days of manually coding applications; these platforms allow developers to visually drag and drop application components and connect them to create mobile or web apps without complex coding. Typically, low code is used for non-critical systems. But this is changing. Combining low code with model-based systems engineering opens up exciting possibilities. Model-based system engineering is an established discipline that tightly defines highly complex products and systems. Together they will speed up the engineering process, enabling domain experts to convert their ideas about products much more rapidly into working products.
It is fun to design complex systems, and low-code model-based system engineering makes this available to a bigger audience. Childhood dreams of spaceships will generate real engineering design files and systems that can be tested in a digital simulator. In this low-code model-based future, you can paint with code. If you can dream it you can do it.