The idea is that its dashboards and alerts provide a constant readout of how engineering projects are developing, enabling managers to identify potential sources of delay, eliminate bottlenecks and drive productivity. The result, Haystack argues, is good for the business and good for developers too in an industry where burn-out and employee well being have become increasingly pressing issues in recent times. Colina commented:

“Kan and I launched Haystack to solve exactly the kind of problems we had seen during our own careers leading development projects. Something like $400bn a year is now being spent on engineering salaries around the world but there is almost no data on what people are doing each day; there is a complete lack of visibility on how teams are performing and where they may need more help.”

Julian Colina; Photo Credits: Haystack

Haystack seeks to remedy that problem through a platform that integrates with GitHub, through which so many developers collaborate and manage projects. That enables it to prove live data insights as a project moves forward. Managers get alerts when problems in a particular area are building up, enabling them to intervene before the issue causes knock-on effects and delays elsewhere.

The results are dramatic. Users have, on average, increased their production deployments by 58% and achieved 70% faster cycle times. That has persuaded more businesses to join up. Just 12 months after its launch, Haystack is now being used by more than 7,000 developers, with technology teams at businesses including Microsoft, GoDaddy, The Economist and Indiegogo all making use of its platform. Colina also adds:

“Companies with strong technology teams are outperforming those which don’t have such strength. Technology teams that follow best practice are less likely to see developers being burned out while enabling faster experimentation, and shipping business value more reliably.”

The first of those points is particularly crucial in an environment where employee wellbeing issues and mental health have moved the front of mind for responsible businesses. He also noted:

“The burn-out issue in the technology sector has been completely unaddressed. Engineers are expected to work on release after release and come under huge pressure.”

Haystack’s argument is that by bringing structure and efficiency to the development process, that pressure can be mitigated and managed. And the bottom-line gains for businesses are enormous: research suggests that elite performing engineering organizations are twice as likely to achieve their organizational goals and that they achieve a 50% higher growth rate over three years.

The company’s backers recognize the potential of a business that is growing fast in its own right, with Haystack having seen its revenues increase at an average of 36% a month over its first year in business. As well as existing backer Y Combinator, Haystack’s new funding includes commitments from investors including Founders Club, Soma Capital, Entrepreneur First and investors Dan Siroker and Blaine Vess.

The extra capital will help Haystack build more comprehensive datasets, improving the quality of the insight it supplies to users through its algorithms and analytics. “We pride ourselves on supporting development speed,” Colina says. “The more data we have, the more powerful the opportunity will be for our users to capitalize on our insight.”

In fact, a survey by IT company ServiceNow and Radar Media shows that 45% of respondents have adopted low-code platforms and that 79% say now is an optimal time to invest in low code.  According to John Bratincevic, senior analyst at research firm Forrester, there were two major use cases for low code and no code in the past year: building new apps or adding onto existing ones. He commented:

“One vendor wrote a solution in 48 hours and sold it to like 25 regional banks. So they themselves got into a whole new business line overnight, well, in two days. And then the banks of course could adopt the solution. Lots of people self-served and made their own using the platforms.”

Adding onto or changing existing apps was also very easy using low-code platforms. For example, Bratincevic recalled a retailer that had to get into the delivery business quickly and because they’d already used low code to build their important applications, it was as simple as adding a new module on top of that application to handle delivery and transportation management.

Changing needs require development speed 

One of the key benefits of low-code development is speed. Traditional software takes a long time to deliver, and sometimes by the time it actually has been delivered, requirements have changed.

ServiceNow and Radar Media’s survey found that low code cut development time at least in half. 42% of respondents had a 2x reduction in development time and 43% saw reductions of 3x.  In addition to being able to build solutions faster, low code also provides the ability to make changes quickly, without compromising on quality, Bratincevic explained.

“There’s a lot of quality checks in these platforms, so like if you’re going to delete a field in a database it’ll stop and go ‘hold it if you do that it’ll break these hundred other things. Here’s how it fits into the architecture.’ There’s a lot of quality checks that are built into the products that make it so that, in addition to being able to develop quickly, you can change quickly with a certain level of quality maintained.”

The pandemic has made companies warier of something like this happening again and how they could respond. “A lot of people had systems that couldn’t change to respond to whatever the different needs of COVID were and that was a huge problem,” said Bratincevic. “So people I think are changing their approach to say ‘what do we do when this happens again? How do we build that concrete ability to change into the systems?’”

For example, when people started working from home and not driving their cars, insurance companies needed to have a way to change their billing systems quickly to be able to issue billions of dollars in refunds.

Younger workers adopting low code

Hari Subramanian, the founder of no-code tool provider Appify, believes the generational change in the workforce and their customer bases is also contributing to low code’s success.

Younger workers tend to be very tech-savvy, having lived most of their lives surrounded by technology. Younger workers with no development experience might be able to leverage that knowledge to go into a low-code or no-code platform and create an application from scratch.  At the same time, younger customers are expecting modern digital experiences, Subramanian explained:

“They want to be able to at the click of a button get a $14 pizza and track it until it reaches their door …  If I’m going to meet a salesperson, I need that same modern digital experience. Things need to be available at my fingertips. I need rapid access to rich information. I need to be able to engage in a very rich way and that demand is being placed on businesses as well. And it kind of comes back to no-code/low-code platforms as a way for businesses to accelerate and deliver to that need.”

In addition to the age of workers, the age of the company also plays a role in adoption. According to Jinen Dedhia, co-founder of low-code platform DronaHQ, new companies are able to adopt low code without a ton of baggage. He compared the low-code movement to the introduction of the Ford motor car.

Larger, more established companies might have some experiences with low code, however. For example, a company with a Microsoft ecosystem could get started using Microsoft PowerApps.

IT still key to low-code success

Low code may have been a popular choice this year, but a few years ago reception among developers and architects was mixed. A 2018 Progress survey of 5,565 developers revealed that 28% of developers and 20% of managers had a positive opinion on low code. The rest fell into categories such as “sceptical” (37% of developers and managers combined), “negative” (21%), “customization and flexibility seen as shortcoming” (17%), and “good for simple apps and prototyping but not suitable for complex ones” (16%).

The increasing push to adopt low-code/no-code tools might have developers and IT teams worried, but the need for those technical roles isn’t going away any time soon, Dedhia explained that these solutions enable you to build faster, but technical expertise is still needed.

In addition, there are some limitations to these tools that require users to turn to their development or IT teams. Dedhia gave the example of a low-code platform not allowing you to create an API endpoint for accessing the data.