App Studio development
Business units increasingly look to control their application development efforts, and Citizen Developers are crucial in advancing this effort. Citizen developers are business professionals who are empowered to build and design real enterprise applications and fast-track go-to-market solutions. As application leaders, the Lead System Architects (LSAs) must help define, guide, and optimize citizen development to maximize mutual benefits for business and IT. With the low-code development environment of Pega Platform™, enterprises can use App Studio to bring business and IT together in real-time through visual models and an agile methodology to build apps rapidly.
According to Gartner, a Citizen Developer is an employee who creates application features for their own needs or the use of other users using tools without active restrictions by IT or business units. For a citizen development program to be successful, IT must sanction and support the tools.
Citizen developers can confidently build on features that LSAs make available through reusability patterns.
App Studio includes contextual help and tours for self-learning, enabling business experts and Citizen Developers to directly capture their objectives and quickly configure applications in Pega Platform.
Roles and responsibilities
Pega-certified employees act as coaches for teams of business experts and other Citizen Developers to facilitate application development.
The following roles take part in application development:
- Citizen Developer
Business professionals, product owners, product managers, business operations and business analysts - Professional developer
Front-end developers, software engineers, app developers, software developers and line-of-business developers - Enterprise IT
Enterprise architects, corporate IT leaders, database administrators, security and network engineers
The following table describes the roles and responsibilities of the application team:
| Role | Responsibilities |
|---|---|
| Lead System Architect (LSA/Application Architect) |
Design applications to be maintainable in App Studio as much as possible, including defining components, applying templates, and promoting other forms of reuse. |
| Lead Business Architect (LBA) |
Lead analysis reports of the application life cycle. Coach the Citizen Developers on how to use App Studio. |
| Citizen Developer | Use the low-code features made available by App Studio. |
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.
LSA responsibilities
Some of the more critical LSA responsibilities that are necessary to support citizen development contributions across different categories in App Studio include application design, enabling complex business rules to be used by the Citizen Developers, enabling branch development, creating UI templates, and applying guardrails and best practices.
Application design
LSAs use App Studio and define the skeleton data objects that the application needs. They ensure the quality and extensibility of the Data Models. They also decouple 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 for use by Citizen Developers
LSAs create reusable components and mark those components as relevant records wherever possible so that they are discoverable in App Studio. They also perform 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
LSAs enable branch development so that Citizen Developers can use them and conduct branch reviews.
Creating UI templates
LSAs create user interface templates for selection in App Studio when configuring a View for a Process Step.
Guardrail and best practices
LSAs ensure that the application design and implementation follow organization guardrails and best practices set by the Center of Excellence (COE) and LSA team. The also ensure that the creation of application Rules occurs in the correct layer and that the developers receive the required or correct access.
App Studio-compliant applications
On the App Studio Compliance: User Interface landing page, you can identify UI elements in an application that might present maintenance or update issues. By analyzing the reports on this landing page, developers can learn how to more efficiently render process-heavy components and save development time during future updates. For more information, see Reviewing user interface components.
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