The Low-Code Application Development Lifecycle

In the first stage, teams define the purpose and goals of the new application, evaluate user expectations, and build a shared understanding of all requirements. Additional tasks include gathering requirements, estimating costs, and allocating resources.

Throughout the application development lifecycle, it’s crucial for IT, business, and stakeholders to stay on the same page in terms of goals and requirements. Low-code’s strong focus on collaboration helps teams break down silos and keeps everyone connected.

What ideation with Mendix looks like:

• The Mendix Portal is a central hub for team collaboration. Features include chat and social tools, user feedback management, backlog management, and DevOps tools.
• Integrations with third-party tools, such as Trello and Jira, are available through APIs.
• The Mendix Platform is built on the principles of Agile, helping teams open up lines of communication to support continuous collaboration and faster development.

As soon as requirements are gathered and plans are in place, application development can begin. Low-code is a visual and collaborative way of developing, and teams of varied skill sets can use it to build applications. This enhances developer productivity, accelerates time to deployment, promotes T-shaped teams, and makes it easier for non-technical stakeholders and users to stay involved throughout the application lifecycle.

What development with Mendix looks like:
Mendix ensures continuous collaboration between business and IT developers. Multiple developers can work and contribute to the same project, in parallel, without friction due to Mendix’s robust version control capabilities.

Mendix Connect facilitates secure data integrations with databases and systems using common methods like REST, SOAP, XML, and ODATA.

Mendix Assist, an AI-powered bot, provides real-time guidance for configuring logic and also measures application performance against best practices.

Mendix supports the development and reuse of various application components like UI, logic, and data. Also find application templates, application services, widgets, and more in the Mendix Marketplace.

This phase involves quality assurance and testing procedures to ensure that the application performs as needed by the business and as expected by users.

Mendix eliminates time-consuming challenges — resource depletion, limited testing coverage, and errors due to manual testing — to help teams deliver high-quality applications that exceed all expectations.

What testing with Mendix looks like:

• All Mendix applications are built using standard, pre-tested components.
• Integration with third-party testing tools and services through APIs.
• Automated testing, consistency checks, quality control through Mendix Quality and Security Management.
• Support for Selenium and JUnit testing frameworks.

Now it’s time to make your application available to end users. Low-code helps you ship solutions faster to your users while simplifying cloud operations. Mendix also makes it easy to deploy cloud-native applications to the cloud of your choice.

Containerization — packaging an application and its environment for deployment — is an integral part of low-code development. The process ensures that applications run reliably and consistently in different environments. Containerization also makes applications more resilient and easier to manage, leading to a lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

What deployment with Mendix looks like:

• Mendix-built applications are containerized and cloud native by default.
• One-click deployment to a public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, or on-premise.
• Maximize uptime and scale without redesign.
• Support for modern cloud platforms like Docker, Kubernetes, and Cloud Foundry.

Once the application is released to the masses, the nurturing begins. The final phase of the application development lifecycle focuses on continuous monitoring and maintenance for long-term application health and usability.

Ongoing application maintenance and incremental updates are often time-consuming, but the Mendix low-code Platform simplifies operations and frees developers from tedious, repeatable tasks.

What operations with Mendix looks like:

• Built-in monitoring tools, featuring trend graphs, performance metrics, and more.
• Automated alerts when there are application issues or storage limits are reached.
• Integration with third-party services like Datadog, New Relic, and AppDynamics to monitor the applications.