On January 24 and 27 we hosted the cLSA Community event that was fully focused on the Value of App Studio. This session focusses on low code development, the use of App Studio and citizen development. In this post you will find the recordings of the three presentations, the slides downloadable as PDF and the Q&A of the session (below the recordings).

The first presentation is done by Samuel Tremlett (Sr Product Manager - Low Code Application Development) and he gives an introduction from the product perspective about low code development, App Studio and App Factory and citizen development.

The second presentation is done by Marc Cheong (Principal Business Architect at Pega) who shares his experience of using App Studio in the discover and prepare phases from his work at Pega  client EASA (European Union Aviation Safety Agency). In this session Marc also shares a number of valuable lessons learned and practical tips.

The third presentation is done by Chris Boone (Consulting Manager and Principal System Architect at Pega) and he shares his experience around supporting his clients that wanted to start with citizen development. He shares how he coached the people in the use of App Studio, the architectural setup to assure reuse and how he was able to empower the teams. Like Marc, Chris provides a lot of valuable lessons learned and practical tips.

The handouts of the different presentations are added as attachments to this post (only visible when you are logged in).

Q&A

Any recommendations or checklist for quickly migrating to a low code approach for applications that are upgraded from lower versions?

For migrating applications which are built in a lower version, we actually have a tool in the platform to help out with this. Start by migrating your application to a new platform through either an in place upgrade or a Rule Admin Product to an upgraded system. The tool can be found in Dev Studio under Configure > Application > Quality > App Studio Compliance

How to use App factory?

App Factory can be found on the Pega Marketplace. There is also a dedicated Pega Community page which has great resources on Academy resources, set up, best practices and how-to videos.

Isn't App Studio recommended for building an app using design templates, that will more easily work with Cosmos React in the future?

Yes! An important note as well - if you cannot find a template you need, you can always create a new design template in Dev Studio and then resuse that template in App Studio. A great example of Dev Studio and App Studio working together 

Are there some customer stories of clients using app studio to develop applications?

You can see Customer Success Stories here https://www.pega.com/customers . There is one that specifically talks about Citizen Developement https://www.pega.com/customers/deutsche-bahn-platform

We've had buy-in to citizen development by the leaders of the organization, but no one wants to actually do the citizen development, take the app studio trainings, or have that become part of their job. How have you found citizen developers? Is there a common job-type or background that you have seen be most successful?

Great question. Our experience so far has taught us that the culture of citizen development can often be a larger challenge than the tool. To help support the culture, we have released 4 new academy courses all focused on getting citizen developers started with very little time. The courses themselves are hours rather than days and can be taken self service as needed. We also have recently released application templates to the marketplace that can be used with App Factory to get started even quicker.

If the citizen developer develops the application using App Studio how resuability can be recommended to avoid creating same properties or data pages multiple times?

There are 2 ways to approach this and avoid duplication. 1. Relevant Records & Layer Cake, what are you making available to the App Studio authoring experience for the Citizen Developer? 2. You can use App Factory and different templates to help provide a governance side to pick this up.

Is there any training missions in PEGA academy that help to enable citizen development? 

For citizen developers this is the best advise to give: https://academy.pega.com/mission/low-code-maker/v1

When Live UI will be available in AppStudio?

Theme-Cosmos App Studio authoring experience uses 'Preview' and 'Design Time' to view and edit your UI, allowing you drill down on to specfic sections as needed. This would be the equivalent of 'Live UI' Dev Studio experience and keeps you in App Studio. For Cosmos React you can use a feature called XRay. You can enable this using the Pcore public api (https://docs.pega.com/user-experience/86/pcore-and-pconnect-public-apis)

An issue I have had using App Studio outside of our Cit Dev program - IDs generated end up not meeting our standards and I am forced to go to Dev Studio and re-save all my rules re-naming them.  Is this a currently known issue and are there any current plans to address this?

Yes this is a known issue. The behavior exists to help support predictable upgrades. We are working on making more logical names in future releases

If I have a couple of rulesets in application and use App Studio, which ruleset App Studio will use? It seems like there is no control over this which limits our ruleset stack in one application. What can be a solution to this? 

App Studio uses the Choose Best Ruleset algorithm to decide where to place a given rule. If you have a specific destination you would like to see a rule land, I would suggest using branching which provides more flexibility on where a rule may land. See this blog for more information about branching in App Studio: https://community.pega.com/blog/how-branch-development-works-pega-app-studio

There might be some data instances that gets generated during development. is there any way to identify this list in order to package them?

All data instances generated from App Studio get tagged with an Application rule set which will then get bundled as a part of a Product Rule. If you are generating these instances in Dev Studio, ensure that data is associated with a rule set so it is pulled as a part of your packaging.

In our projects, we see a lot of use cases where screens require grids for presenting a list of data but the views do not support grids at the moment. How to make those screens app studio complaint?

Yes, it may appear that way. However, the creation of a 'grid/table' is supported in App Studio. If you start at the Data Model first, creating a Data Relationship, Query or Embedded Data then mark this as 'Multiple Records'. You can see this as a reference article on how to get there https://docs.pega.com/case-management/85/adding-data-relationships-forms-and-data-models. It is a slightly different paradigm and way to think about approaching the configuration of your Case Type. 'what data do i need' then 'what UI views/sections' will support that. As we move further into the Cosmos React App Studio authoring experience, more and more of this will be configured direct on the Case Type so it is usefull to start approaching it like this.

Does Pega 8.6 support multi tab layout? Pega Smart Investigate older version uses multi tab layout, if I use Pega 8.6 and Cosmos how is multi tab supported?

8.6 does support multiple browser tabs (not a multi-tabs in the single browser). In Theme-Cosmos you can right click any open case link and use the brower 'open in new tab', if you are in Cosmos React apps, then hovering an open case link will give user to open 'preview' or 'open in new tab', actively encouraging browser tabs. See also https://community.pega.com/node/2297931 . Although its not specifically solving your problem in a single browser this would be the recommended way to tackle that use case.

Can u retrieve feature and stories from JIRA?

In app studio you can open up agile workbench. When you connect your Jira with agile workbench then you can see the stories from Jira in your agile workbench. You can see more information on this https://docs-previous.pega.com/application-development/86/integrating-agile-workbench-jira-pega-platform-73x-74x and the market place https://community.pega.com/marketplace/integrations/agile-workbench-integration-jira