Breaking Boundaries: Low-Code Revolutionizing Agile Development
from Gurujot Singh, Mokxa Technologies
With rapidly evolving technologies and constantly shifting consumer needs, there is a pressing need for enterprises to digitally transform themselves to stay agile, responsive, and competitive. Digital transformation through conventional high-code solutions can be challenging. Too often, businesses struggle with insufficient resources, constrained timelines, and by the time they would develop a high-code solution, the environment shifts again.
Enter low-code development platforms! There is a plethora of low-code products emerging in the market to fill this gap. However, not all of them are created equal. There is a lack of documented guidelines on how to leverage the power of low-code to build solutions that actually work. Here is where Joget, an open-source low-code/no-code rapid application development platform, comes to the rescue!
Why Low-Code?
With IT backlogs increasing, innovation continues to be bottlenecked. Fortunately, with tools like Joget, this problem can be solved by empowering citizen developers to develop solutions with minimum needs of IT professionals. Source: Project Management Institute
Using drag and drop, Joget empowers non-IT users to rapidly develop business applications without the need for coding skills, empowering them to easily bring their idea to life without unnecessary complexity. And now, with the launch of Joget DX 8, there is an increased focus on User Experience (UX) and Governance, as non-technical professionals of diverse backgrounds and competencies increasingly embrace low-code platforms!
Enterprise Use Case For Allied Benefit Systems: Marrying Low-Code With Agile Methodology
Enterprises across various industries can benefit from using Joget to rapidly build solutions without compromising on their value creation and usability. In this blog, we explore the development and go-live of the ‘Project Governance Application' for Allied Benefit Systems, the largest third-party insurance administrator in the United States.
An agile development model modified to leverage low-code Joget was used to achieve this in under 4 weeks.
The Problem
The client had a manual-intensive system to manage new project intake requests via emails and spreadsheets. The Project Governance Application was built to remedy this. Users can submit new intake requests, undertake necessary approvals, address T-Shirt sizing, and assign project criticality. The solution is also integrated with Allied's legacy system (Azure DevOps), where their projects are maintained after completing the request approval lifecycle. The result is a turnkey solution to seamlessly manage, govern and track all projects enterprise-wide.
Our Approach
The project was initiated by defining 3 critical parameters - scope, requirements, and timeline. We teamed up with accountable stakeholders on Allied’s team to dive deep into their core business challenges, co-designed a high level solution with them, and then laid out a roadmap to develop this solution.
What’s really incredible about Joget is that in a mere handful of sessions, we built out a comprehensive workflow with:
Participants/User roles
Business activities
Integrations
Business logics
At the same time, we did not fixate on semantics and minor details during this stage. Working alongside the client stakeholders ensured a user-centered solution, eliminating overhead that is inherent in the build-validate-fix iterations. Joget enabled us to achieve this through daily work sessions, because not having to take the business users into technical weeds meant we could work with them everyday, without imposing too much on their day to day operations. Using Joget's inbuilt functionalities, we were able to:
Meticulously analyze each form and field
Configure error validations and exception handling
Establish cross system data visualization
Integrate with Azure DevOps using API tool
Finally, once we were ready with the brains and guts of the application, we focused on plugging gaps around the user experience. This entailed validating roles and permissions, finalizing integrations, designing KPI dashboards, and generating reports.
Daily Status Calls - Productive or Inefficient?
Joget is key in accelerating agile delivery. Instead of waiting for weeks, we were able to plan, execute, evaluate, and retrospect on a daily basis! Our daily calls with the client lasted from short meetings of a few minutes to address minor changes, to extended discussions up to 30 minutes, focused on major breakthrough concerns.
The concept of breaking down the project into 3-5 logical sprints, performing daily progress reviews, and making changes on the fly ensured successful sprint closures. This greatly reduced the risk of major revisions and falling behind timeline. Here are some advantages of daily sprint reviews in tandem with Joget that we saw:
Reduced cost and time associated to make significant changes during development.
Flexibility to review design and rapidly make changes as needed. This helped blur the boundaries between need-to-have requirements, and nice-to-have desires.
An instantly gratified stakeholder as a result of the simplicity and prowess of a low-code solution.
After we defined the workflow requirements, we were able to demo a functional process design within 24 hours. The client then requested an additional role and approval requirement, which we also easily incorporated into the process and tested within the day.
All this trickled down into reduced overall cost and time, immense flexibility, and an already bought-in client stakeholder who championed change management!
Go-Live Under 30 Days
By the end of 4 weeks, we achieved a successful go-live for the Project Governance Application. We completed UAT, trained & onboarded users, and migrated the entire database of records to the new system. With a seamless shift and everything in place, Allied Benefit was able to immediately start using the new system without any delay. Thank you, Joget, as well as the Allied Benefit and Mokxa team behind it!
The Verdict
Using Joget in an agile environment made building the Project Governance Application a breeze. Working alongside Allied Benefit from finalizing requirements to adopting short daily sprints and reviews, ultimately led to the successful deployment of the solution by the Mokxa team in record-time.
This exemplifies the synergy between Joget's low-code platform and agile methodology, enabling rapid transformation of innovative business ideas into fully functional, value-driven enterprise applications. I hope this blog inspires you to try Joget on your next project!