Maximizing developer productivity is core to delivering the future front office where fast innovation will be a given and not an exception.
The low-code/no code revolution and model driven development are having a significant impact on speed of innovation across financial services and with back-office’s in particular. However, its graphical and configuration driven approach is not as naturally suited to sales & trading, where speed and resilience are critical, and the solutions must handle a lot more edge cases.
Many low/no code solutions excel when the problem is with a complex business process that involves coordinating across multiple teams and multiple specialized “functional centers”. Sales & trading on the other hand is a functional center. Speeding up development here is also about accelerating the implementation of specialized functionality that deepens the capability.
Fortunately, much of the functionality being delivered in front office projects share a common denominator. It’s the constant rebuilding (or “reinventing) of the common denominator that sucks up much of the innovation dollars and time.
At velox we model this common denominator in 3 discrete stages – aggregate: any and all data required for a particular task, analyze: perform tasks to allow decisions to be made and act: execute decisions in the appropriate way.
We share with low/no code solutions, the desire to materially lower the barrier to entry and make developers of different levels of experience productive and we have thought long and hard about how to most effectively apply the principle in sales & trading.
Our approach continues to rely on Java application developers, and instead of higher level languages or visual tools we provide a custom Java developer environment that’s enriched with specialized building blocks or “abstractions” that can be configured and extended.
In this way, existing development teams can work in an environment that is familiar to them both in terms of language and IDE and have complete freedom to implement bespoke functionality.
In our application platform, each of the aggregate, analyze, act steps are broken down further into software building blocks that can be specialized and wired together rapidly to create a full stack business application.
The platform takes care of all of the non-functional requirements such as resilience, scale and supportability and does the heavy lifting around standing up web applications and services allowing developers to maximize the amount of time they spend building business functionality.
What building blocks exist and how they can be configured is dictated by striking the right balance between time-to-market and flexibility and is based on our many decades building front office systems and distilling out common patterns. It is a constant process of learning and refinement.
In conclusion, yes you can apply low code principles that will move the needle with speed of innovation, the skill-sets that staff the project won’t change but the productivity levels will.