Citizen and Professional Developers
Enabling an Optimal Collaboration between
Business People and IT
Low code doesn’t make professional programmers obsolete, but rather defines a new way, in which professional developers collaborate with business people to compose and maintain products. Toward this end, the T-LCAP includes two interconnected tools for each of these two groups.
The CitizenTool is designed for business people in product ideation who often have little programming knowledge. As a so-called citizen developer, you are able to create, change and enhance products with no coding whatsoever. Using just the CitizenTool’s browser-based graphical editors, you enhance and change existing applications. In addition, you can compose new apps based on prebuilt building blocks called Packaged Business Capabilities (PBCs). You visualize your product ideas and demonstrate them immediately to members of your team and even to customers. This no-code approach for citizen developers ensures that tight link to business people and customers which is needed today to implement and maintain fit-for-use, commercially successful telecoms products.
But how far can you get with coding – especially as new goals keep popping up as markets and customer requirements change? After all, the no-code approach is limited by the PBCs the CitizenTool puts in the hands of citizen developers. What happens when a PBC is missing, e.g. for a specific integration into a third-party web service? Or when you want a completely new user interface component? To deal with such cases, we need a way for professional developers to continuously enhance the set of PBCs available in the no-code CitizenTool.
Instead of no code, the T-LCAP’s ExpertTool uses low code, improving the performance and proficiency of programmers. More importantly, the ExpertTool allows professional developers to extend the reach of the CitizenTool by adding prebuilt PBCs. The ExpertTool includes several browser-based graphical editors, e.g. for data modelling, API integration, API exposure, business logic definition and UI component definition. Each graphical editor allows the developer to use simple drag and drop to do most of the work. But of course the ExpertTool also allows developers to add handwritten code where and when needed. The T-LCAP supports JavaScript/TypeScript as the unified programming language for both backend and frontend development.
This all makes for the best possible collaboration between professional programmers and business people: professionals use low code to make sure citizen developers always have the prebuilt components they need, and business people can use no code for composing and re-composing target applications.
The Telecoms Low-Code Application Platform: An Overview for Citizen Developers
The Telecoms Low-Code Application Platform includes both a no code CitizenTool for use by business people without programming skills and an ExpertTool for professional programmers. In this e-book, we briefly outline how the citizen developers can compose and individualize applications with no coding whatsoever.
