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Quickbase News

Sandbox & Low-Code: Unleashing Citizen Development Across Enterprises

Written By: Melissa Nazar
March 31, 2020
3 min read

Quickly creating your business-critical applications while minimizing risk and disruption—it doesn’t have to be a choice between one or the other. Sandbox capability makes it possible, enabling cross-functional teams to quickly create and optimize business-critical applications without risking disruption.

At Quickbase, we introduced our Sandbox functionality to customers at the end of last year. But in the face of a rapidly changing market and the potential for business disruption, incorporating Sandbox into your process is more important today than ever before.

What is Sandbox?

Sandbox bridges the gap between business users and IT departments, providing a place to easily collaborate when creating and changing applications, while giving IT departments stronger governance through tighter control over the development process. It allows for the best of both worlds—empowered citizen developers who can create solutions to their challenges, paired with the safety and security provided by IT governance.

While sandboxing is standard practice in traditional software development tools, it has been elusive in low-code platforms until now. A sandbox is an integral part of an application lifecycle management (ALM) strategy, allowing you to build, change, verify and release applications quickly in a controlled, safe environment without disrupting the rest of your business.

Why Does it Matter?

Our Chief Product & Technology Officer Jay Jamison said it best: “Now, more than ever, organizations in all industries need ways to modernize important processes with software in days and weeks, and they need safe, reliable methods to do that.”

As companies look to quickly modernize and connect their processes to keep up with fast-changing market conditions, safe testing and optimization of workflows by business users, from anywhere in the organization, is an especially critical functionality today.

There are three key ways Sandbox helps organizations:

  • Enabling collaboration when building, before going live: Sandbox provides a separate, protected environment where different stakeholders can make changes, provide input and verify requirements quickly and easily, all before deploying to production. This means less changes needed after an application goes live, streamlining the process.
  • Minimizing risk and disruption: Because changes are made in a protected environment, governed by IT, Sandbox helps eliminate disruptions to your team’s workflows while still allowing for needed iterations, minimizing overall risk.
  • Facilitating IT governance: Sandbox lets IT teams work hand in hand with citizen developers, allowing for application development best practices and governance.

How Does it Work?

Sandbox supports ALM by allowing builders to work in a safe development environment, separate from but contained within an application. In Sandbox, changes can be built, tested and reviewed, before those changes are published to all users.

Additionally, any changes and development work in Sandbox can be done while users continue to use the live application—it remains unaffected by changes being developed and tested until deployment.

As you implement and test changes in the sandbox, Quickbase keeps track of the changes that have been made. As you work, you can review, publish, or discard the changes.

How Can I Learn More?

Sandbox is available as part of Quickbase’s broader governance capabilities to help IT better manage and control modern application development, which requires iterative updates in line with product-centric design principles. To learn more, visit our recent press release or our resources on Sandbox.

Written By: Melissa Nazar

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