The Pros and Cons of Rapid Application Development Platform

Frequent iterations, component reusability, and prototyping are some of the common features of the rapid application development platform. These features allow developers to measure the project’s overall rate of progress and simultaneously maintain and monitor schedules and budgets. The rapid application development platform allows skilled software developers transitioning into multi-discipline roles (such as full-stack developers) to rapidly generate prototypes and working codes within days that might otherwise take weeks or months when using traditional development techniques.  

Rapid Application Development Advantages

Both business and IT influence every stage of the application delivery process. While businesses tend to focus on requirement analysis and the production phase, IT drives the development and QA phases of the modern software development life cycle. This precisely marks the beginning of a period of misalignment between both units and often times, it becomes problematic when trying to align business requirements with IT strategic plans thereby making the IT-business alignment a distant dream. The rapid application development model not only simplifies the app development process but also closes the gap between individual business units and IT by creating an ecosystem. This, in turn, streamlines and reduces the complexities that are part and parcel of the app development process. Rapid application development models thus bring businesses executives and IT software developers onto one platform.

Similar to the object-oriented programming paradigm that keeps objects and components masked from one another, the rapid application development model, too, allows designers and developers to create components that are functional and independent of one another – which could be used in iterative release processes or prototypes. As a result, each element within the software architecture is compartmentalized so that it can be modified as the software evolves. Relevant user feedback through every stage of software development is invaluable.

The rapid application development model supports regular user interfacing, this enables developers to gain greater user insight and obtain feedback through frequent iteration and prototype releases. Thus, the entire development team receives priceless evaluation during the most critical stages of the development cycle.

In traditional app development platforms, adapting to frequent system changes can result in late delivery and frequent glitches that prevent enterprises from building and updating apps quickly. As a result, businesses tend to lose out to competition since developers unable to share fully functional and testable features with customers on time. But with the RAD platform, businesses are able to overcome the odds and foster customer engagement and feedback. This helps businesses gauge consumer psychology and demand, thereby helping businesses adapt to changing business needs and enable enterprises to align themselves with the market demands and challenges.

That brings us to the next point. The rapid application development model has proven to be useful even to end-users. Once end-users use the app, businesses can collect survey reports from the end-users, who usually recommend improvements and suggestions. The data or feedback thus collected can be collated and thoroughly analyzed so that developers can make improvements.

In the waterfall model approach, for example, developers need to wait until the very end of the lifecycle to begin integration with other systems or services. The rapid application development model, on the other hand, supports integration from the very inception, which solves numerous integration issues. By allowing early integrations within prototypes, the rapid application development model seamlessly identifies potential errors or complications within integrations and brings about immediate resolutions. Consequently, application downtime is considerably reduced.

The software is malleable and susceptible to dramatic changes and can alter the entire IT landscape. Therefore, development teams should make good use of Rapid web application development tools early on in the development cycle since the model focuses on the reusability of components and the reuse of codes.

Most traditional SDLC models offer significant opportunities to reduce waste, subsequently accelerating the app delivery process. This holds true for rapid application development platform. The RAD platform utilizes the value chain functionality to analyze the software delivery process, helping businesses identify potential flaws and gaps in switching tasks and hand-offs that can adversely affect cycle times. As a result, organizations can reduce waste and eventually speed up the application delivery process.

The proliferation of devices and IT consumerization has resulted in increased user-expectations. Simultaneously, enterprises are also always on the lookout for app development platforms that offer speed, agility, scalability, and data integration capabilities. Developers also have to frequently deal with the proliferation of APIs and front-end technologies and devices. A robust rapid application development model can take care of all aspects, enabling enterprises to achieve competitive advantage and improve stakeholder satisfaction while simultaneously allowing developers to create and deploy higher quality apps. 

Disadvantages of RAD Model

Like all software development models, rapid web application development to is not without flaws. Although the advantages far outweigh its disadvantages, this section nonetheless will examine some of the potential pitfalls of this model.

The rapid web application development tools heavily depends upon technically skilled developers, who can easily adapt to the rapidly changing software system and its components. Another drawback would be its affinity towards systems that can be modularized, thereby allowing a variety of team members to modify or swap elements in and out using the rapid application development model.  In other words, only those systems that can be modularized can be built using RAD software. Also, its dependency on frequent user interfacing can act as a double-edged sword, since this approach requires equal and sustained commitment from both users and developers and the development team may not always be willing to communicate with users on a frequent basis thereby resulting in the failure of rapid web application development projects. The rapid web application development tools decreases application scalability since applications developed using the Enterprise RAD platform usually begins as a prototype and then progresses into a finished application.