Rapid application delivery for an unpredictable future
If 2020 has taught us anything, it's that we can't be sure what's around the corner. Now that 2021 has kicked off, what we’ve learned from the past year is that digital acceleration is essential for enhancing customer engagement, generating new revenue and serving customers through the digital channels they’re choosing to use. According to a recent Gartner report, Sustain Your Digital Momentum,:
"Digital acceleration enabled some to respond to crisis-driven market and customer needs. It helped others to leapfrog the competition through more compelling customer experiences, greater efficiency, or better decisions informed by data.”
So what has worked? Rapid, agile and continuous development, delivery and management of all the applications needed to digitalise any enterprise – these are features that helped build apps our clients loved. OutSystems, Optimation’s low-code development platform partner enable us to visually develop an entire application, easily integrate with existing systems, and add custom code as needed.
Take a look at some of the most popular features of the OutSystems solution - the ones that helped us build apps that gave our customers surety in an ever uncertain landscape.
Build it fast
Workflow Builder
In a nutshell, Workflow Builder turns ideas into apps in minutes. This feature enables business experts, analysts, and process owners to solve their own internal productivity challenges through an easy-to-use wizard.
Once set up, anyone in the organization that designs and manages workflows can use Workflow Builder, extending the team of in-house app developers.
Workflow builder means users can:
- Create, iterate and launch business apps - fast
- Promote business-IT collaboration
- Enjoy no limits as apps grow
Designed specifically for line-of-business users, Workflow Builder promotes collaboration within modern, interdisciplinary teams while ensuring IT remains in full control.
Experience Builder
Experience Builder is another feature designed to turn the idea lightbulb in your head into a working app in only minutes. It provides users with the ability to create and test prototypes in hours and generate production-ready code - with experience and development best practices built-in - at lightning speed.
Experience Builder means that you can:
- Design faster, test earlier and more often
- Create high-quality mobile experiences easily
- Make use of fully integrated digital product development
All generated code is built following best practices to ensure a sound and scalable architecture.
AI-Assisted Development
The OutSystems platform uses AI to improve the application development experience, taking the guesswork or repetitive actions out of multiple processes. This feature guides users through the development process using the expertise learned from millions of anonymised code patterns to suggest the right tools and patterns for any situation.
It allows you to:
- Reduce friction when planning development next steps
- Increases focus and productivity by helping create logic flows faster and with more confidence
- Create logic that's less error-prone and aligned with development best practices
AI-assisted development can increase focus and productivity by helping create logic flows faster and with more confidence - even for complex tasks.
Build it right
Architecture Dashboard
This is a monitoring feature that effectively manages technical debt during every stage of development. It means you can keep an eye on technical debt across your app portfolios. It allows IT leaders to visualise complex cross-portfolio architectures and identify problems while also helping developers follow best practices and avoid common pitfalls.
They'll also:
- Learn from development best practices
- Avoid having to rewrite apps from scratch
Controlling technical debt is naturally a top concern, one that’s mitigated by the Architecture Dashboard.
Visual Merge
This is Outsystems' merge feature and team collaboration solution. It's a simple versioning system that labels the modules with an incremental version number on each successful publish. You can restore or compare a module to any previous version that is available on the server.
It also enables:
- The automatic merge of module versions
- Resolution of merge conflicts
- Compare and merge versions
And of course, it also means that several developers can work on the same module at the same time.
In-App Feedback
This feature enables user feedback for apps, meaning your users can send feedback while they're using an app in a specific environment. For example, you can:
- Enable QA teams or the key users to send suggestions
- Get users to report problems in an app running in the QA environment.
The app feedback feature is available in all OutSystems apps.
Mobile Apps Build Service (MABS)
With MABS, you can generate mobile application packages for iOS and Android without having to install any mobile platform SDK. OutSystems regularly releases new versions of this cloud service with support for new mobile stacks, and therefore newer mobile platform versions. Version selection is done in the Service centre for each application and for each mobile platform.
There are two options:
- Always use the latest version available
- Use a specific version selected from a list
The MABS version used to build a mobile package is saved along with the application version tag, i.e. when you tag an application version OutSystems saves the MABS version information.
Build it for the future
TrueChange & Runtime
This is one of OutSystems' platform services.
TrueChange powers the OutSystems platform, removing the guesswork and repetition from development and delivery—at design time, build time, and runtime.
It means that users don't need to worry about:
- Installing complex tools for configuration
- Build and version control
- Finding experts to set them up
At build time, TrueChange assures error-free and consistent application builds, deployments, and changes across all application components. At runtime, TrueChange provides automated, AI-fueled analysis of an application’s implementation and execution metrics, along with recommended solutions.
Machine Learning Builder
ML Builder for short, is a tool that helps developers without advanced data science knowledge to build machine learning models and add them to their apps.
Your developers or development team can:
- Easily and reliably implement valuable AI use cases that use your company’s data.
- Crush the skill set required to add ML to applications.
- Add AI to applications to improve efficiency and generate revenue opportunities through personalization.
- Reduce the costs of using ML for innovation and differentiation.
- Add predictive capabilities tailored to your data throughout your organization’s digital portfolio.
The end result is apps that use AI and predictive analytic to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and promote business growth.
Do you realise digital transformation is key, and interested in leveraging a low code platform for your buisiness? Check our comprehensive guide to low code development.
If you'd like to find out more about why these features are so popular, get in touch with our sales team.