February 6, 2017

The three Rs of enterprise application development: Why should I pick 2?

Enterprises often struggle to strike the right balance for the investment required for various efforts in delivering applications. As businesses become more competitive, largely global, and heavily end user-focused, it pushes the boundary of application requirements in order for the apps to be successful.  These requirements are usability, scalability, and faster release cycles.

The landscape of application development and delivery has changed a lot in the past few years. Today’s modern applications need to look great, have a robust architecture so it can scale to millions of users, and should be quickly delivered to customers in order to outsmart the competition.

The ability to deal with these three requirements has been a constant struggle for any enterprise. In any complex application project, one way or another, we face the immutable law of finite resources: We’re bound by constraints. Good, fast, or cheap, we’re told. Pick any two.

This is the classic triple constraint model that you often have to deal with as project leaders. A similar model applies to enterprise application delivery:

Rich UX, Rapid Development, or Robust Architecture: pick any two.

As you can see, while all these 3 things are very important for modern applications, they often work against each other. A project that focuses only on user experience and faster time to market may not have the best robust architecture, while another one that focuses on robust architecture and great user experience may need a longer duration to complete. Something has to give, right?

It used to be that businesses depending on the nature of the application could get away by just focusing on two of the above aspects,

  1.  Small and Medium Enterprise: Focus was on Rapid Development and Rich UX
  2.  Non-Consumer Business Applications: Focus was on Robust Architecture, Rapid Development
  3.  Businesses that focus on Robust Architecture and Rich UX always suffered from long-lasting development cycles

Should enterprise application delivery always be an exercise in sacrifice. given the demands on IT in today's businesses, it has become hard to sacrifice any one of the above. So the question is how do I get to choose all.

Wait.. Hold On, can we get a magical wand that can help us have all the three dimensions of App Delivery. Look no further, modern rapid application development platforms or also referred to as low-code platforms are designed to solve this conundrum.

Take a look at WaveMaker, which specifically addresses the enterprise needs to develop scalable applications, with great user experience out of the box in shorter time frames. Excited, try out a free trial and see how you can now cut short development time and still keep intact your enterprise and end-user requirements.