Will 2022 be the year the year citizen developers finally take the reigns leading application development across their respective lines of business? It looks likely, thanks to emerging low-code, no-code and serverless solutions. And, importantly, there will also be another "citizen" in the mix -- professional developers themselves, rapidly accelerating their abilities to plan, assemble and maintain increasingly complex enterprise systems.
Non-developers and developers alike are increasingly seeing greater sophistication in the applications they can build with low or no-code approaches. For example, one of the announcements coming out of AWS' recent re:Invent conference was an enhanced platform offering, Amazon SageMaker Canvas, designed to make AI development accessible to the masses through a visual, no code capability that enables business analysts to build machine learning models and generate accurate predictions without writing code or requiring machine learning expertise. Many other vendors are tacking toward offerings requiring little or no coding knowledge, with much of the backend integration and logic hidden in the background, powered by automation and AI.
After years of anticipation and letdowns, the age of the unencumbered developer may finally be upon us. Nearly half (47%) of enterprises in a TechRepublic survey now use low-code and no-code in their organizations. One in five of those not adopting at this time said they intend to adopt the technology over the coming year.
"Automation is in the driver's seat for much of this change," says Daniel Dines, CEO and co-founder of UiPath, in a post at Wired. "Up to this point, IT teams or automation centers of excellence have led much of this initial development. In 2022, however, citizen developers will be at the forefront of this acceleration."
