We just pulled the rabbit out of hat. Initial reaction is awkward silence. “Guys are cheating, that's not possible”. Next: “When something looks too good to be true, it probably is.”

We just told you that we can automatically produce roughly 80% of any business application using LeBLANC.

We understand. May be hard to swallow.
It is possible. Here's how.

Prefer laziness

Petri and I have done our own software like this for the last 20 years. It all started out of pure laziness and boredom, it just wasn’t exceptionally fun or rewarding to write the same code you have already written tens or hundreds times before (reminds me something of Ford Fairlane and cheese grater). Why don’t we just automate this?

I love rides with my old Piaggio X8 250cc during short Finnish summer. Petri has a thing for music (he’s also a pro musician/producer!). Much more fun things to do in life than writing code that can be automatically produced.

Domain experience

Both Petri and I have architected and written tens of different business applications for multiple customers while working for multiple employers, in our 30+ years in the field. We already know by experience the things customers will sooner or later ask for the application to do. Things that are common in every business application, like translations for static texts and data. Role based access control sometime with record-level flavor. And lots of other standard features recurring in every application. Of course, now LeBLANC does all this for you, so you don’t have to. Straight out of the box.

Automating boilerplate

Industry consensus is that roughly 50% of any application code has nothing to do with business functional requirements. This boilerplate code just has to be there so that user interfaces appear, database gets read or written, users get assigned roles etc. None of this shit brings any business value to your customer. Just by removing the need to manually write this boilerplate, you cut your effort in half. No customer should be forced to pay for writing these manually anymore. Automated by LeBLANC.

“Add your business content, we automate the rest”

This is the secret sauce: To make the magic happen, you - as the master sorcerer - tell our tools the things that have business value for the customer – things that bring in the money, like: What data the system should be able to process? How is it related? What are the business processes? Who are your user? What are they trying to accomplish with the system? What data they can access?

And just like that - with a click of a button - Fusion generator takes these definitions based on requirements, writes all the boilerplate and standard feature things mentioned earlier, and adds your business content into the soup. Let boil for roughly 20 minutes, and you have a fully working application running on Azure where you can log in and taste your application, evaluate and iterate on your ideas. Refine the model – regenerate. Magic happens.

Enable customizations

Yes, you get the source codes. Important part of LB methodology is that there are things easier (and faster and more cost efficient) to just code than try solve with any models. This is where the original 4GL failed roughly 20 years ago – not everything should be attempted to solve with models. Our whole ideology is based to enable these code customizations – not to prevent them.

What is the remaining 20% not automated?

Understanding requirements and modeling them into a design is the most important part. And coders are always needed in the final customization. We encourage you to write key use case user interfaces, like customized role homepages. Integrations to other systems. Satellite systems like customized mobile app for company’s customers. What happens on process step backends. Integrate the AI assistant. Instead of writing no-fun, simple to automate code, your best talent now can focus on things that make sense – create business value for the customer. Grrrr.

Now you can do it too!

Proof?

Some of you have already seen the magic happen: Automation ratio has varied from 67% to 98% in these already completed projects, resulting constantly over 50% in cost savings and faster time-to-production. If you are interested, we are happy to bring the show on the road for you! Just drop us a note!

Ladies and gentleman:
I can assure you, the magic is real.

Yours,
Janne Hansen
LeBLANC Finland Oy

---

Related

• Our customers
• Industrial approach to software development
• Valtiokonttori: Pilvipalvelu syntyi kuin liukuhihnalta
• FAQ