How citizen developers offer IT relief -- and headaches

Low-code application development platforms enable citizen development, where anyone can build software. While this approach can be a boon to productivity, it carries definite risks.

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There's too much development work, and not enough talented developers. Enterprises must deal with coding skills shortages, whether they hire contract help, train up more dev personnel or turn to low-code platforms -- an increasingly popular method.

With these low-code application development options, nontechnical employees called citizen developers rely on simple graphical user interfaces or model-driven platforms to create, generally speaking, non-mission-critical applications that improve business productivity. Because developers don't have to write every software component, these low-code application development platforms should free them up to work on more timely or valuable features.

But, how much can you really trust citizen developers, who might not have a sense of technical and legal limitations when they put together a workflow and connect to business data? In this infographic, we break down the pros and cons of citizen developers, and take a peek at the ascension of these low-code platforms.