Low-Code reduces Development Backlog and accelerates innovation

The increase in backlog activities is the main issue faced by application development leaders. Beyond creating inefficiencies and lowering productivity, it can cause team dissatisfaction and decreased job satisfaction, leading to a loss of talent value and more complex management. 

A typical development backlog includes four main categories of activities:

• Features and functional improvements: New functionalities requested by users or the business, often broken down into complex technical subtasks. 

• Corrective maintenance: Bugs, system errors, and security vulnerabilities require urgent fixes.

• Technical debt: Refactoring legacy code, performance optimizations, or library updates.

• Operational requests: Adaptations to new regulations (e.g., GDPR), integrations with external systems, or cloud migrations.

These activities accumulate due to three recurring factors:

• Ineffective prioritization: The team lacks clear criteria to classify tasks, leading to decisions based on urgent issues rather than strategic value.

• Continuous changes in specifications: Shifting business needs cause ongoing changes in requirements and specifications, which stack up.

• The rigidity of traditional tools: Manual development with languages like Java or .NET implies development cycles of several days, lengthening sprints

Low-Code: the lever to clear the backlog and boost productivity 

Low-Code features benefit all backlog activity categories by simplifying or even eliminating low-value tasks, saving workdays.  

1. Features and Functional Improvements 
   Platforms like WebRatio Platform enable the creation of new features through visual models (IFML) instead of traditional code. This approach reduces development time and enhances effectiveness by simplifying requirement comprehension between Business and IT. 

2. Corrective Maintenance 
   Low-Code reduces errors through: 
   a. Automatic code generation: Code quality is ensured by WebRatio Platform generation engine, avoiding human and syntactic errors through built-in and automatically validated writing rules.
   b. Visual debugging: Graphical mapping of flows helps identify anomalies without line-by-line analysis.​

3. Technical Debt 
   Updating the code of legacy applications is handled by the platform: easily update WebRatio Platform to the latest version and regenerate the application to update the underlying code. The ability to reuse IFML modules also eliminates the need to duplicate visual models and rewrite generated code.

4. Operational Requests 
   WebRatio Platform productivity and flexibility make it easy to address operational needs faster by integrating new features or external systems without effort. 

At the same time, Low-Code can reduce or eliminate the factors that contribute to backlog growth. 

• Ineffective prioritization: Low-Code supports a business-driven approach, implementing features critical to achieving business goals. Thanks to improved productivity and code quality, urgent issues decrease or are resolved faster, freeing time for planning, innovation, and staying aligned with business objectives. 

• Constantly changing specifications: Low-Code allows for rapid development even with unclear requirements, enabling teams to extend features based on real-time user feedback—making development responsive to business change.

• Rigidity of traditional tools: The simplicity and productivity of Low-Code platforms enable Agile development with fast sprints, minimal documentation, and full flexibility. 

WebRatio Platform’s added value: IFML and prioritization 

The IFML (Interaction Flow Modeling Language) modeling language makes user interaction, actions, data paths, digital experience, and core functionalities explicit. This keeps developers focused on the main priority: ensuring the application works correctly so the user can take intended actions and achieve desired results. 

This perspective ensures alignment with functional requirements derived from business objectives defined during the design phase. Development priorities therefore match the application’s business priorities, and, thanks to the system view provided by IFML, it’s immediately clear which functionalities are essential and which are secondary to delivering the desired output to users. 

Discover how Low-Code accelerates enterprise application development >