Legacy code that exists with all enterprises today is because of the accumulation of Technical Debt. According to Wikipedia, Technical Debt reflects the implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy (limited) solution now instead of using a better approach that would take longer.
Just like monetary debt, if the technical debt is not repaid, it can accumulate interest, making it harder to implement changes to keep up with the growing business expectations.
One of the ways of avoiding Technical Debt in application development is by abstracting various layers of the application. For example, abstracting Front-end development from Back-end development.
This is where low code app development platforms like Neutrinos comes to play, where abstraction of each layer can be done faster and efficiently.
The platform decomposes the complete application architecture into business-meaningful and easily maintainable abstract layers.
These abstraction layers allow organizations to manage dependencies, configure access management, perform integrations, and adopt new technologies discretely and in turn reduce the technical debt pile-up thereby making it easier for organizations to continually adapt applications to changing business needs.
When you build an application using Neutrinos low code, you get to design your application in such a way that changes made to the application flow or the client logic, does not affect the server flows or the server logic. Also, the changes made to the client logic and the server logic do not affect the user interface. All of these put together do not affect the authorization and authentication of the app.
Only those layers that need to be redesigned are taken out and replaced with the newly designed layers. Thereby, reducing the accumulation of technical dept to great extent.
If you have 2 versions of your APIs created as server flows, you can create the client logic to call a specific version of the API, wherein the server team can make changes to the other version of the API without causing any disruption.
Once the latest API is ready to be deployed , the client logic can change its logic to call the latest one.
Similarly, within a layer, elements can be abstracted and redesigned without affecting the rest of the layer. For example, server flows can be designed in such a way that only specific flows or a node could be replaced without affecting the overall integrations to various environments.
In the server flow displayed above, the find operation to be performed on the MongoDB operation can be deleted without affecting the database configuration connection, or the insert operation.
Also, you can abstract database flows completely from other operational flows. For example, you can create a server service called MongoDB User Management service, that has server flows to perform CRUD operations on the MongoDB Database.
Similarly, you can create another server service called MSSQL User Management service, that has server flows to perform CRUD operations on the MSSQL Database. You can then design other APIs such as createUser and connect to any database service of your choice on which you want to create the new user.
Neutrinos Low Code Development Platform does not only provide abstraction while designing your app, it extends the functionality even to the deployment phase.
When you deploy your app, Neutrinos handles deployment of the server services independently from the deployment of the UI or the client app. The dependencies and deployment stages for both these services are maintained and managed separately, making them work independently.
Conclusion
By enabling abstraction and reducing technical debt, low code application development platforms such as Neutrinos enables your organizations to strike the balance they need to increase the speed of development, and to continually adapt existing applications to meet business needs,
Though low code platforms are not the ultimate answer to reduce Technical Debt completely, it is one of the smartest ways organizations should adapt to depreciate Technical debt over the long run.
Author:
Supriya Ananth
Lead Content Developer and Strategist
Neutrinos