Collaboration Made Easy on Visual LANSA

Creating applications is no longer a task for a single developer or a siloed team. As applications become more complex, they demand collaboration across diverse skill sets, including developers, designers, architects, and business analysts.

Improved software quality, increased efficiency, better problem-solving, enhanced creativity, and reduced development time and cost are major benefits of collaborative software development.

However, achieving seamless teamwork may not always be easy. There are common pitfalls like:

• Communication breakdowns
• Version control issues
• Problems with knowledge sharing
• Failures in coordination and planning
• Lack of transparency
• Isolated workflows
• Security concerns.

These issues can lead to delays, errors, and missed opportunities.

Visual LANSA is one of the best solutions to break down these barriers. Visual Lansa enables collaborative development with its centralized development environment, robust source control, streamlined workflows, and unified low-code language. Developers can manage the frontend, backend, and middleware with this platform. This integrated development environment (IDE) ensures that every contributor to your team, from developers to project managers, can participate, innovate, and maintain consistency throughout the development lifecycle.

In this article, we will explore how Visual LANSA simplifies collaboration, improves productivity, and accelerates application development.

How Visual LANSA Improves Collaboration

Collaborative software development is the cornerstone of successful application development. Visual LANSA excels in providing tools and features that foster seamless teamwork and collaboration. Here’s how Visual LANSA transforms software development:

Support Application Prototyping

In modern application development, speed is one of the most critical factors. Also, it is challenging to bridge the gap between conceptualization and implementation without the proper tools. Developers may need to go through multiple iterations to align the product with the business and user requirements. This problem may lead to redundant work, additional costs, and delays, affecting product-to-market time. Addressing this challenge is crucial in collaborative development environments, where the final product is the result of collective teamwork and shared efforts.

Visual LANSA supports rapid application prototyping and iteration, boosting team productivity. Teams can create shared visual models, experiment with different ideas, and quickly test solutions without extensive development delays. Developers can prototype the application and user interface design with the Visual LANSA framework. Whether it’s a desktop or a web application, Visual LANSA ensures that teams can identify issues, gather input from stakeholders, and iterate on design in real-time by enabling faster feedback loops. This capability not only shortens development cycles but also empowers teams to deliver high-quality applications faster.

Manage Assets in a Centralized Active Repository

Code redundancy is a common roadblock in collaborative development environments. It reduces developer productivity, lowers the application’s performance, overconsumes resources and time, and complicates application maintenance.

With a centralized repository, Visual LANSA eliminates code redundancy and discrepancies. Developers can manage all application assets, such as fields, files, tables, business rules, components, and resources, in one place. This unified approach fosters a consistent workflow that ensures everyone on the team can access the same tools and data.

Objects Available in the Visual LANSA Centralized Repository (Source: LANSA Docs)

This central repository is vital in enabling teams to focus on collaborative software development without the friction of managing scattered resources.

Simplify Cross-Platform Development

In large software development projects like modernization, multiple teams work on different platforms such as IBM i, Windows, macOS, Android, etc. Cross-functional team collaboration is one of the major challenges for these projects. Visual LANSA simplifies this by enabling the deployment of applications across multiple platforms—web, mobile, and desktop.

Visual LANSA enables a single team to do cross-platform development within a single integrated environment. This approach eliminates the need for separate teams working on different platforms, streamlines collaboration among developers, and ensures consistent outputs.

Take Advance Computing as an example. A financial software and consultancy provider in Melbourne, Australia, they wanted to cater to a new audience by transforming IBM and desktop-only applications into fully integrated web and mobile applications.

Advance Computing Home Page (Source: Advance Computing)

With Visual LANSA, they created a robust, cross-platform solution. They streamlined deployment across multiple platforms with the help of professional low-code while ensuring consistency and quality. Visual Lansa’s cross-platform deployment capabilities enabled them to handle the development of the new solution for multiple platforms with a single team. They could implement it on all platforms from a single set of LANSA source codes without any replication of efforts or translation of code for other platforms.

As a result, the company could deliver innovative and user-friendly applications that met client demands. Also, it enhanced their competitive edge in the market. This successful transformation demonstrates the power of Visual LANSA in enabling enterprise-level collaborative and cross-platform software development.

Explore more about the Advance Computing case study.

Leverage Version Control and Change Management

Keeping track of the changes is another major challenge in a collaborative development environment. Visual LANSA addressed this by offering real-time editing, robust version control, and advanced debugging tools. Developers can work simultaneously on the same project without overwriting each other’s changes with these features. They can track edits, review past versions, and roll back changes easily when necessary. This ensures that the project remains error-free and aligned with team goals. This streamlined change management helps to reduce bottlenecks and improve overall efficiency while maintaining the software quality standards

The below image shows how the Visual LANSA version control system works.

• Visual LANSA edits text files that have been checked out from the version control system (VCS) or creates them to be put in the VCS.
• The Repository is still used to contain the LANSA objects, but they are now reflected in a directory to which the VCS also has a view.

Visual LANSA Development Using a Version Control System (Source: LANSA Docs)

Empower Your Team with Visual LANSA

Visual LANSA simplifies and enhances collaboration in application development. Its rapid prototyping tool, centralized development environment, robust version control, and cross-platform development capabilities empower collaborative teams. These features allow teams to work efficiently across different platforms and environments, maintaining consistency throughout the development lifecycle.

Visual LANSA empowers teams to meet deadlines and deliver high-quality applications. It achieves this by reducing communication breakdowns, promoting shared responsibilities, and accelerating feedback loops. By streamlining workflows and providing tools for real-time collaboration, Visual LANSA ensures that all team members can contribute effectively to the project’s success.

For improved team productivity and seamless collaboration in your next development project, consider using Visual LANSA—a low-code platform designed to support teams in building applications faster, smarter, and with greater teamwork.

Take the next step toward revolutionizing your development process by scheduling a demo or starting your free trial now. Discover how Visual LANSA bridges collaboration and productivity to help your team achieve more.