Google Sheets No Code Shootout

My last post was a primer on the burgeoning low code/no code (LC/NC) movement.  Many regard this progression as a technical democratization movement, freeing the citizen developer in each of us.  While that may be true, the movement may also simply represent the next phase of abstraction within software development.  You can read more about LC/NC in this well-balanced piece in Harvard Business Review.

This new post -- the first in a series of deep dives -- focuses on pure no code solutions that sit on top of  Google Sheets.  This approach is often referred to as spreadsheet-as-a-database.  Specifically, I will be looking at AppSheet and Glide.  If, like me, you are already familiar with Google Workspace (formerly G Suite), this is the easiest way to develop and deliver fully functional, data driven apps that run on mobile devices or within the browser.

It is important to stress there is absolutely nothing you need to do to enable the integration between AppSheet or Glide and the Google Sheets document.  There is no exposed API to understand nor any configuration needed.  You simply select (or create) the tabs in the Google Sheets doc as you develop your app and CRUD operations are implicitly available.

The Challenge

My challenge was to use each of the tools -- AppSheet and Glide -- to build a compelling, intuitive app based on a small dataset that could be managed in Google Sheets.  

For this exercise, I was reminded of an important maxim of software tool "demos": to the degree possible, leverage data that you find interesting, that you understand well, and that your audience will find engaging.  With that in mind, for my proof-of-concepts, I gathered a dataset representing results from national soccer tournaments sanctioned by FIFA (the global governing body for the sport).  This dataset includes both the men's and women's World Cup tournaments.

Per me, table stakes for this class of tool are:

• App development requires only a Google account
• App development requires only a web browser and an Internet connection
• App development is free (a reasonable trial period or a limitation on users / data / features is acceptable)
• App development is truly 100% no code

The Results

With each tool, I created a simple read-only app based on the same Google Sheets document that included my FIFA tournament dataset.  

Creating each of these apps took less time than it took to write and edit this blog post.  That is, even accounting for a learning curve on each of the tools themselves, about 1 day apiece.

	AppSheet	Glide
Positives	Extremely easy to use Excellent out-of-the-box Views (1) and Components Integration with Apigee and REST API datasources (2) Access AppSheet functionality directly from within Google Sheets	Extremely easy to use Excellent out-of-the-box Tab Styles (1) and Components Vibrant support community
Negatives	Cannot create additional Views	Cannot create additional Tab Styles No out-of-the-box REST API integration feature
Other Notes	Warnings and Errors are generally helpful, but there were occasions where a message was confusing / misleading or it required me to exit AppSheet to resolve

(1) Views and Tab Styles are pre-built page templates.  These enable you to present the underlying data in a variety of ways and with pre-defined flows.

(2) Although out-of-scope of this blog post, the ability to interact with other data (outside of the Google Sheets dataset) through industry standard REST API is an extremely important feature for many apps.

The Verdict

Both AppSheet and Glide are excellent choices for quickly designing, developing, and deploying simple, intuitive apps for mobile and web.

AppSheet edges this shootout because of its tighter integration with Google Sheets, Google Cloud, and REST APIs (Apigee).  

Of course, features are changing at a blazing speed across the entire spectrum of LC/NC. 

You can find my solutions here (AppSheet) and here (Glide).  I would love to hear from you about this post, these apps, and your experiences with AppSheet and Glide.

Do-It-Yourself Software

"That looks too much like real programming!"

"Well, it's not quite rocket science!"

These are two of my favorite quotes from ex-colleagues.  

The first quote above is from over 25 years ago, when I was working at a software company called Omnis.  It had developed the first cross-platform (Mac and Windows) software development tool.  The tool included a visual builder, a proprietary database, and connectivity to all other contemporary relational databases, most notably Oracle.  My colleague offered this observation when asked why not use Java (which had recently been released) instead of the Omnis tool.

The second quote above is from 4 years ago, when I was working at another software company that provided an eCommerce platform.  My colleague offered his response when I asked him how easy it was to build custom solutions with the platform.  He then proceeded to talk about actual rocket science and his Master's degree in Aeronautics from Purdue!

While my colleagues' responses were clearly tongue-in-cheek, they each highlight the tendency that we, in technology, are inclined to overcomplicate things.  The fact that there was over 20 years between those remarks, suggests that, perhaps, not so much has changed.  Most, if not all, business-facing problems on which I have worked over my long career, did not need real programming or anything like rocket science.

Which brings us to the burgeoning low-code/no-code movement.  These contemporary tools provide another layer of abstraction on top of "real programming" and aim to democratize software development.  They do this by offering visual development interfaces that eliminate or reduce the need to code and understand complex programming syntax and concepts, replacing it with familiar drag-and-drop gestures and simple property assignments.

The fact that technology heavyweights Amazon (Honeycode), Apple (SwiftUI), Google (AppSheet), Microsoft (Power Apps), Oracle (Apex), SAP (AppGyver), and Salesforce (Lightning) all have skin in the low-code/no-code game, suggest that we have reached an inflection point.  

No longer does every application need to be viewed through the lens of the corporate Information Technology department and the all-knowing high-priesthood of software architects and programmers!

As such, perhaps we can think of these low-code/no-code tools as very distant relatives of COBOL (Common Business Oriented Language).  As its expanded name suggests, COBOL was/is more oriented towards "business users" than "engineers".  Don't be fooled, though, it still sports a fairly arcane vocabulary and syntax.

Intuitively, we all understand that smaller teams are more nimble and efficient.  A key promise of low-code/no-code is its ability to support this small team structure, reducing or even eliminating the increasingly over-specialized disciplines -- architect, tech lead, front-end developer, back-end developer, DevOps engineer, data analyst, business analyst, designer, QA engineer, project manager, scrum master, etc. -- within corporate IT.  The challenge of maintaining consistent messaging across these roles and disciplines is akin to the phenomenon of the Telephone Game/Chinese Whispers.

Over my long career in software development, I have always been struck by this industry paradox -- our mission is to encourage productivity and yet our choice of tools and process are often inefficient (for the job at hand).  In addition to implementing solutions in more traditional languages such as Java, JavaScript, PHP, PL/SQL and shell scripting, I have dabbled in the following tools that aimed to smooth away some of those rough edges and inefficiencies, and could, therefore, be considered predecessors to today's low-code/no-code generation of tools:

• Filemaker
• Omnis
• Kony
• jQuery
• Visual Basic
• Intel XDK
• Hypercard/Supercard
• Microsoft Access
• FrontPage
• WordPress
  

"Real programming" (and real programmers) will always be needed, of course.  Someone has to understand concepts such as pointers, memory buffers, static versus dynamic typing, polymorphism, object orientation, functional programming, instruction sets, data types, registers, and memory management.  However, that is not (and should not) be a requirement for most of the business automation that is being developed right now.  

I have always looked for ways to simplify business software development within my teams, either through improved tooling, process, management, or culture.  In my next blog post, I will take a deep dive and test drive the following low-code/no-code tools*:

• Airtable
• AppSheet
• FlutterFlow
• Glide

Stay tuned for my next post to find out which tool will make me the best citizen developer.

*This subset of the vast (and rapidly evolving) low-code/no-code market, focuses on general-purpose app development in the Google ecosystem.  This is the area that I'm currently most familiar with.  I plan to later create deep dive posts into more specialized low-code/no-code tools focused on AI/ML, web design, eCommerce builders, and business process automation (BPA).

Frictionless Software Leadership

Frictionless helps us to make sense of the complexity

Delivering quality software is complex.  This has never been truer than it is today.  Over a long career, I have regarded it my mission to help simplify this process, no matter the role.  While there isn't a one-size-fits-all for every team, product, project and initiative, there are a collection of best practices that have consistently served me well.  I call it Frictionless Software Leadership that draws on the best of Agile, DevOps, Lean, Scrum, Six Sigma, Total Quality Management and even Waterfall.  

Frictionless Software Leadership is guided by principles of integrity, transparency and simplicity.

Please note that I use the expression "delivering quality software" and not "developing quality software".  This distinction helps to underscore the importance of DevOps (infrastructure and deployment), SecOps (security and compliance), UX (usability and experience), QA (quality and testing) and Client Services (tech support and professional services).  Treat each of these as first-class disciplines in teams and projects to help dispel the misguided notion that their considerations can be bolted on after development.

What is Frictionless Software Leadership? 

Frictionless Software Leadership allows us to provide efficient and effective guidance to teams working on software projects, products, and other initiatives.  It helps provide answers to the "Why?  What?  How?  Who?  When?" questions, while ensuring that leadership is not unnecessarily in the critical path or becoming a bottleneck.  

Equally important, Frictionless Software Leadership puts the client (or customer) first.  As W. Edwards Deming asserted: "The consumer is the most important point on the production-line."

There are 4 pillars of Frictionless Software Leadership:

1. Appreciate the (Technical) Art-of-the-Possible
2. Understand the Constraints of the Initiative
3. Drive Planning with Data (Not Documents)
4. Enable Stakeholder Self-Service

I regard these pillars as equally critical and complimentary to one another.  I will dive deeper into what I mean by each of these in a moment.  However, I first want to mention that much of Frictionless Software Leadership has become second nature to me.  That is to say, I do these things almost subconsciously.  This blog post has been a helpful exercise, allowing me to unpack what I have tried in the past and objectively reflect on and document what has worked.  I have also used it as an opportunity to corroborate my first-hand experiences with industry methodologies such as Agile and Lean.

Appreciate the (Technical) Art-of-the-Possible

It is imperative that technical leaders regularly dive deep into the state-of-the-art in tools, frameworks and infrastructure, re-calibrating their leadership approach accordingly.  Recent advancements in our industry -- such as APIs and microservices, containers and orchestration, and, of course, cloud computing -- have fundamentally altered the way that software is architected, deployed, managed, and monitored.  In addition, advancements in no-code, low-code, and BPM/BPA significantly affect the composition of project teams, timelines, and budgets.  It is unthinkable that these fundamental shifts would not have an impact on the way we lead and manage technical teams and projects.

This re-alignment, between our leadership approach and contemporary technology, helps us to:

1. Gain the trust of clients and customers
2. Maintain respect within the technical team
3. More deeply appreciate the business problem(s) being addressed
4. Genuinely appreciate the skill of the technical team, while providing the platform to intelligently probe when necessary
5. Assist the delivery team with prioritization, design, estimation, development, testing, and other hands-on tasks
6. Inquire about vendors' functionality and integration claims
7. Anticipate industry trends*

*For example, 6 years ago, as I was digging deep into the pros and cons of SaaS and PaaS, I identified an at-the-time unmet opportunity to "productize data management".  That notion of DaaS (Data-as-a-Service) -- broadly speaking at least -- is now embodied in products such as Snowflake, Splunk, Mulesoft, New Relic and facilitated by the de-facto industry standard REST APIs.

Incidentally, due to the ubiquity of REST APIs, I would recommend all technical leaders and managers develop a simple web or mobile app to familiarize themselves with the details of a call construct and the returned JSON payload.  At an absolute minimum, familiarity with a tool such as Postman to execute a variety of API calls, provides us with much-needed context and insight into this core architectural style.

Understand the Constraints of the Initiative

Every software project, product or initiative comes with constraints.  In addition to easily quantifiable and understood limitations (for example, the project budget for the year is $200,000), it is important to recognize and document more subtle boundaries before planning begins. 







These constraints loosely fall into 3 buckets (with some examples):

• Organizational 
• Top-down, command-and-control reporting structure?  May not be compatible with some of the team composition ideals noted above.
• Small(er) team size?  Usually preferred.
• All stakeholders identified?  
• Motivations understood?
• Who controls the PM iron triangle parameters?
• Budget?
• Schedule?
• Scope?
• Cultural 
• Predefined thresholds for metrics and standard definitions for Red, Yellow, Green flags?
• Definition of "Done"?  In the context of a feature, sprint, or release, it is critical to get consensus on this "metric".
• Project Begin and Project End?  These are not always as obvious as we might think.
• Client (or customer) engagement?  It is important  to clearly identify ownership and responsibilities around engagement and be sure to properly distinguish project (or initiative or product version) tracking from client (or customer) tracking.
• Are "heroics" encouraged?  Ideally not, since this leads to burnout and is also often an indicator of a single point of failure or knowledge/power hoarding.
• Is product/project secrecy critical?
• Encouragement to "eat our own dog food" and use tools developed in-house?  Ideally yes, since this shortens our internal quality feedback loop. 
• Technical 
• Greenfield** or Brownfield?
• On-Prem or Cloud or Hybrid?
• Integration with legacy or home-grown CRM, ERP or other application?
• Corporate/enterprise mandated tools?

**Counter-intuitively, even so-called Greenfield projects or products will have constraints (mostly Cultural or Organizational).

From my experience, project outcomes are positively influenced by transparent conversations about goals, budgets, schedules/deadlines, and roles/responsibilities before any (meaningful) work begins.  Naturally, it's important for us to regularly review these constraints (and assumptions) to ensure alignment and accuracy.

Drive Planning with Data (Not Documents)

As software managers and leaders, we sometimes mistakenly equate raw effort with progress.  In particular, I have seen the count of project artifacts held up as a meaningful measurement of forward movement.  Instead, I recommend a data-first strategy.  Replace the effort involved in authoring and updating project artifacts with investment in a Project Portfolio Management (PPM) system.  There are some excellent PPM products on the market -- some of which are free -- or we can extend our project management tool (Smartsheet, MS Project, etc) or issue tracker (JIRA, Github, Zendesk, etc) or even develop from scratch.  The solution does not have to be exotic or elaborate; the key is to remove as much of the manual overhead and drudgery associated with project plans, charters, stakeholder analysis, requirements and other project artifacts.  Equally important is ensuring that this data is accessible to all interested parties (see Enable Stakeholder Self-Service, the 4th pillar of Frictionless Software Leadership). 

Depending on policy, there are likely certain project artifacts -- for example, SOWs, contracts, legal papers -- that must be standalone documents.  Make those the exceptions.  From my experience, the efficiency gains in making the transformation to (primarily) data-first are considerable, especially as our number of projects, products and initiatives increase.  This transformation to a data-first strategy should include a clear understanding of our current and future system(s)-of-record and an extensive use of data visualizations, wherever possible.  I have had good success with the following digital visualizations:

1. Calendars***
2. Maps***
3. Timelines
4. Kanban boards
5. Gantts
6. Milestones
7. Value streams and flows (work-, data-, process-)
8. Architecture diagrams
9. Checklists****
10. Cheat-sheets****

***The archetypal visualizations!
****Not visualizations but extremely useful nonetheless.

Enable Stakeholder Self-Service

As technical managers and leaders, we can help bring order to the chaos by establishing a one-stop-shop project portal with optional authentication and authorization, accessible through a single URL via any web browser from any channel.  This will consolidate all the project data and artifacts for convenient access by all stakeholders, ideally through a drill-down dashboard-style interface.  Occasionally, there will be exceptions, but universal access to everything should be the starting goal.  Transparency and simplicity are keys to eliminating project ambiguity and confusion. 

Since we have already made the majority of our project information data-driven, the portal will be real-time.  This helps to eliminate confusion around document revisions and versioning.  However, where there are exceptions and static documents are referenced from the portal, we must be vigilant about concurrency.

It is our job, as leaders, to direct stakeholders to the portal and to encourage input on suggestions for content and format change.  Depending upon the portal's complexity and thoroughness, it also offers us a forum to regularly deep dive into a particular aspect of project tracking.  This helps the team-members to better understand and appreciate disciplines and features in which they might only tangentially be involved.  It also provides an opportunity for stakeholders to showcase their work and achievements or even highlight an area of concern.

Benefits of Frictionless Software Leadership

In summary, Frictionless Software Leadership helps teams to:

• Be more efficient, by...

• Favoring smaller, more focused teams
• Favoring a consolidated toolset
• Understanding communication channels
• Clarifying goals and definitions
• Focusing on DevOps' The First Way ("work should only flow in one direction")
• Empowering adaptation to situational changes (for example, remote collaboration and WFH)
• Be more trusting and transparent, by...
• Accessing a single source-of-truth ("project portal")
• Sharing accomplishments and tips (and frustrations!)
• Collaborating regularly
• Be more content, by...
• Encouraging "pride of workmanship" (one of Deming's bedrocks)
• Reducing frustration (when searching for project relevant information)
• Enabling leaders and managers to spend more time addressing team blockers (instead of attending to busy work updating marginally useful documents)

This blog post documents the ideals and, of course, we recognize that concessions will usually be required.  However, using this approach and applying our much-harder-to-quantify-but-equally-important soft skills, we can have success delivering quality software.