We’ve been moving toward this for more than 15 years: The rise of citizen development of software apps. This is the creation—or ideation, if you will—of business applications and application features by the employees who use them. Citizen developers is a clear trend as 2016 wanes, and a specialized new IT business sector is springing up around it. Please note that nobody is saying the conventional—and, in many ways, unconventional—software development communities of skilled and experienced professionals are going to become irrelevant anytime soon. However, since the turn of the century, a growing number of enterprise and consumer applications intentionally have been designed to be configured for specific use cases by line-of-business professionals who wouldn’t know a line of code from a verse in a Shakespearean play. But they do know how to follow a wizard, use a drop-down menu and follow directions. A lot has changed from the days of write code, test, debug, test again, debug, beta test, release GA—wash, rinse, repeat. This eWEEK slide show, based on new research from software toolmaker Quickbase, examines this trend.
