Low-code platforms allow you to create applications using graphical user interfaces (GUIs) instead of writing code. They are attracting more and more attention, as they help business users quickly create applications without programming knowledge.

Thousands of companies use low-code platforms to develop mission-critical business solutions. Everyone who has already worked with such tools was able to appreciate their reliability and convenience. However, when a business reaches a certain level of maturity, its ecosystem may require non-standard approaches that the basic low-code platforms are not able to provide.

Low-code is great for large-scale development, but there are situations when it is necessary to borrow methods from traditional programming. This allows you to significantly improve the quality of solutions, reduce the number of routine tasks and facilitate the work of the development team, thus reducing project costs.

In this article, we share our experience in solving complex development tasks on the low-code platform using non -standard approaches.

Client

Our experts were invited to help several teams developing a CRM system for a large bank using the low-code platform. The group consisted of more than 50 people of various roles: developers of different levels, QA specialists, business analysts and engineers. The bank's activities cover many areas, including retail lending, corporate lending and mortgage lending, and each team was engaged in functionality for its own area. The releases took place independently, but all the teams created a single universal application.

The main difficulties of the team were related to the quality of the releases and the complexity of their installation.

Evaluating the quality of the application

Many low-code platforms have built -in tools to ensure the quality of applications. These are dashboards that display the general state of the application, the ability to view the developed functionality in branches and track the functionality through tests.

Unfortunately, when several groups are working on the same application, the functionality developed by one team may implicitly affect the work of another team.

Conducting a full-fledged cross-review and regression testing is not always possible, so the logical solution was to apply the best practices from traditional programming. The world of development on Java offers mature application quality control practices that have been developing for over 20 years. Atomazing specialists decided to adapt some of them for the low-code platform:

1. Modular testing in Java
2. Control Build quality
3. Code review using external tools

1. Unit testing

The main problem was the lack of complex integration tests that could verify the operation of the set business rules in aggregate, excluding interaction with external systems that may not be available. Such functionality is often missing in low-code platforms, but deep knowledge of Java has solved this problem.

With the help of Java unit testing tools , our team quickly wrote the necessary unit tests and integration tests that allowed us to check builds and identify problem areas. The Java toolkit is so extensive that it allows you to create tests for all the necessary business scenarios.

2. Build quality control

Our specialists sought to automate the quality control of a potential release after assembly. The team has added new warnings and restrictions to the development environment. We created a stage in the pipeline that checked the compliance of the assembly with the established criteria:

• The lack of warnings without explanation from the developer.
• The lack of medium and high level warnings.
• The lack of performance-related warnings.
• Coverage More than 85% of new features have been tested.

If the build did not meet the criteria, pipeline automatically rejected it.

3. Code review

The built-in code review tools on low-code platforms are suitable for standard projects, but they are often limited for customized applications. We have integrated tools from traditional programming.

Convenient text representations of changes have been created for all low-code elements , allowing reviewers to leave comments on specific lines. This accelerated and improved the review process.

Automation of the assembly pipeline

Most low-code platforms support CI/CD processes, but their flexibility is often insufficient. For example, a release may include not only a new application, but also changes to the database, complex data migration, and instructions for configuring environment variables.

The Atomazing team adapted the pipeline using Java approaches. Based on the configuration file, the build server unloaded the necessary artifacts, executed SQL scripts, and performed migrations. This approach minimized manual operations and the number of errors.

Conclusion

Low-code platforms provide extensive business opportunities. However, if the built-in functions are not enough, it is always possible to integrate the best practices of traditional programming to achieve the best results.