App Studio development

Pega-certified employees act as coaches for teams of business experts and other citizen developers to facilitate application development. 

The whos' who in application development

Roles and responsibilities of application team

App Studio supports real-time UI with predefined design templates. Any person involved in a business process can contribute to application planning and developing the approach that helps achieve the best effects while providing IT solutions for business.

Some of the more critical LSA responsibilities that are necessary to support citizen development contributions across different categories using App Studio include:

Application design:

• Using App Studio and defining the skeleton data objects that the application needs.
• Using Dev Studio to revise directed inheritance.
• Ensuring quality and extensibility of the data models.
• Decoupling the case layer from:
  • The location of the systems of record.
  • The form that the systems of record take.
  • The way that the systems of record persist the data.

Enabling complex business rules to be used by the citizen developers:

• Creating reusable components and marking those components as relevant records wherever possible so that they are discoverable in App Studio.
• Performing complex positioning of rules and placeholders for the rules in specific rulesets by using Dev Studio, which empowers the delivery team to pick up the relevant versions from App Studio where possible.

Enabling branch development:

• Enabling branch development so that citizen developers can use it.
• Conducting branch reviews.

User Interface:

• Creating user interface templates for selection in App Studio when configuring a view for a process step.

Guardrail and best practices:

• Ensuring that the application is designed and implemented according to organization guardrails and best practices set by the Center of Excellence (COE)/LSA team.
• Ensuring that the creation of application rules occurs in the correct layer and that the developers receive the required or correct access.

Common tasks that can be accomplished with App Studio: 

• Application packaging.
• Application switching.
• Add case type.
• Case participant configuration.
• Stage configuration and updates (such as stage validation, add optional process, optional actions, and alternate stages).
• Data type and data model viewing.
• Configure fields as primary fields in a data model to autogenerate consistent views for case creation, edit and detail views. Adding or updating primary fields in the data model will automatically update views.
• Data model definition by uploading a .csv or .xlsx file.
• Explicitly define default data pages to enable consistent referencing of data objects and case types.
• View configuration.
• Application styling.
• Personas and user creation.
• Creating channel interfaces creation.
• Persona-based portal configuration by using a simple, model-driven approach.
• Page creation and modification (UI Pages) for use in menus to simplify navigation. With pages, landing pages can be created immediately.
• Citizen developers can edit application names, URLs, descriptions, and business objectives directly in App Studio to provide more context about an application.
• App Studio user management provides enhanced security configuration features at a persona level that can be configured on case types, data objects, and configuration sets.

• Users of an application can change application settings at run time by creating configuration settings. As a result, users can adjust an application to their business needs in a no-code way. As configuration sets minimize the need for rule overrides and custom rule changes, it is easier to maintain and upgrade. Configuration settings are grouped into configuration sets for better organization of resources. Configuration sets consist of configurations that define how different elements in an application work. In the background, by adding a configuration, you create a property that the application references. At run time, users can change the value of the property in a no-code way to provide flexible application behavior.  Configuration settings are data instances of the Data-Configuration-Setting class.
  For relevant training materials, see Configuration sets. 
• Citizen developers can author decision tables that define conditions that include multiple elements and result in different outcomes.
• To gather data from users of your application, you can now prepare questionnaires in a low-code and user-friendly way in App Studio without switching to Dev Studio.

Benefits of App Studio

App Studio accelerates your project by ensuring guardrail compliance, transparency, and visibility. You can also use the App Studio environment for enablement, collaboration, and innovation:

Check your knowledge with the following interaction:

Commit to leverage low-code application development (making use of App Studio):

Effective use of templates and engaging collaborators with different skills and roles saves time and increases work efficiency.

Create Microjourneys for customer success

Help customers reach a successful resolution in their business processes by applying the Pega Express™ methodology while working on implementation projects through journeys and Microjourneys™. When the focus is on one journey at a time, you reach results more rapidly.

Adopt feature-driven development

Develop capabilities in the context of a feature to maintain functional requirements and project status directly in your application. Associate features with elements of an application that needs to be developed.

Reuse build-on capabilities

Reuse the functionality that you inherit from built-on applications so that you can focus your development efforts on unique features and capabilities.

Design applications for reuse and extension

Save time and speed up your application development process by designing your applications for reuse and extension. When you create reusable elements, such as rules and classes, you can implement them again in future projects to make your work more efficient.

Engage and communicate with stakeholders and team members

Communication is a crucial part of developing applications. Pega Platform™ supports the uninterrupted exchange of information for development team members and users who process cases in your application. Enhance collaboration with shareable documents, spaces that gather professionally connected users, and messages that users can post in a Pulse gadget. Built-in social tools allow for agile and consistent cross-functional communication.

On the App Studio Compliance: User Interface landing page, you can identify UI elements in an application that may present maintenance or upgrade issues. By analyzing the reports on this landing page, the developer can learn how to more efficiently render process-heavy components and save development time during future updates. To know more details, refer to App Studio Compliance landing page.

While creating an application in App Studio, be aware of a few differences with Dev Studio. At design time, some features are disabled or have limited options when you first configure them in Dev Studio and then switch to App Studio. 

The table does not contain an exhaustive list of differences. For more information, Design-time limitations in App Studio.