jeylabs

Author: Neil Ward-Dutton, MWD Advisors.

Low-code application development platforms can offer beleaguered teams huge benefits in terms of development velocity. However true application delivery agility – and through that, business agility – only comes when teams can optimise the whole delivery process. Few low-code application development platforms really work in ways that make that broader optimisation easy.

The low-code application development promise – fulfilled by K2 (and other vendors and products, too) – is about speed and agility. It’s simple: when you write less application code, you make faster progress.

The promise is enabled by tools that do the ‘heavy lifting’ of application development for you. They abstract away all the messy implementation details associated with low-level system interactions, as well as providing high-level specification tools specialised for building functionality that’s commonly required within particular domains. So, when you work with products from K2 and other similar vendors, you use high-level, graphical ‘model-driven’ specification tools that give you powerful shortcuts to developing workflow management functionality, task interaction forms and other application user interface elements, business data management functionality, reports and dashboards, and so on.

The tradeoff that comes when you use low-code application development platforms like these is that the code that does the ‘heavy lifting’ to deliver working application functionality behind the scenes is, by design, hidden from you. Some generate all the low-level code necessary to run applications standalone, and others provide high-level specifications that are interpreted by a proprietary application server at runtime; however all low-code application development platforms are in essence proprietary.

As the promise of low-code application development becomes more widely realised and organisations deliver more applications with speed and agility, so the applications they’re used to create are becoming more sophisticated, numerous and business-critical. It’s natural, in these cases, for organisations to make application quality assurance a high priority. What’s more, broader ‘DevOps’-related application delivery trends like continuous integration/continuous delivery – driven by cheap and flexible cloud infrastructure – depend on the ability to rapidly test and re-test application functionality.

When it comes to low-code application development platforms like the K2 platform, though, the most widely-established general-purpose software QA toolsets and approaches have limited applicability. This is the challenge that PowerToolz aims to address.

Low-code application development platforms can offer huge benefits in terms of development velocity. However true application delivery agility– and through that, business agility – only comes when teams can optimise the whole delivery process. Few low-code application development platforms really work in ways that make that broader optimisation easy.

jeylabs’ PowerToolz offers a suite of integrated automated testing and administration tools designed specifically for the K2 low-code application development platform, and through that, addresses the broader delivery agility challenge for K2 customers. All the core test automation bases are covered, and offered at a compelling price point. What’s particularly noteworthy is that by using the K2 application repository itself to store and manage testing artefacts alongside K2 application artefacts, PowerToolz delivers a number of significant quality management benefits that will help teams work with K2 quickly and effectively at scale.

You can download and evaluate the software from the PowerToolz website at https://powertoolz.com.au.