The Citizen

Inspiration

I am a Pega engineer and I started working with Pega from 4.2 SP6 version. Over the years I am amazed how Pega’s product Engineering team has developed impressive product features and brought new solutions like CLM , 1:1 Engagement , Customer service, Sales Automation App Studio and Robotics.

Pega’s product engineering team is my biggest inspiration.

I realize Pega is doing their best to help organizations with citizen deployment by brining in tools like App factory , New Pega Academy , Community How to videos. They are really impressive.

In this hackathon, I have built a solution which brings App factory , Pega community and Pega Academy together and provides an unified experience to the Citizen developers.

Please consider this project as my effort to support Pegasystems vision on citizen development as I truly believe the vision and support it from my heart.

What it does

It makes life easy for the citizen developers, coaches and governors at Pega’s app factory. Promotes reuse and best practices.

How it does it

1. Guides the citizen developer with App creation journey

The solution guides an user to turn his/ her idea into reality with a light weight Pega express like journey. He / she performs all the steps of Pega express but in a light weight format which is appropriate for citizen development
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2. Let the organization realize the business value of the automation idea

At the Discover phase, the solution empowers the organization to realize the potential of his idea in terms of cost savings .

3. Lets the coach & citizen developer scan environment for reusable components and encourage to use them

During the Discover Phase, you identify , prioritize and size the journeys. At this moment the solution lets the team ( Citizen developer , coach ) scan the environment for reusable components.

4. Creates the reusable component stack automatically for coach and citizen developer

After the re-usable features are identified, the solution intelligently identifies the reusable applications and creates a virtual app where the coach can pick and choose the journey and data objects alt text

5. Helps Governor to prioritize by proving him business value and technical complexity.

Governor can see the potential of the idea and technical complexity which helps him to prioritize

6. Automatically provisions the new environment with the chosen components

At the prepare stage the solution creates the new application with all the built on reusable components chosen at the discover stage. The solution makes the class structure and data structure automatically so that the citizen developer can get things ready made and coach do not have to create them by hand. alt text

7. Helps the developer complete the job with configurable tasks and relevant Pega academy / Pega community contents

Prepare , Build and Adopt happens at the App studio. The application provides configurable tasks to the citizen developer and also helps with the task by showing him relevant “How to videos ” from Pega Community and relevant Pega Academy Modules and challenges alt text

How we built it

Its built 100% with Pega technology
The Citizen is built on App factory and can reuse all the features
For the feature showcase OOTB rules and classes have been used
For the Automatic app creation OOTB Engine API is used
Academy and Community Contents are configured as Data pages

Challenges I ran into

As of now with OOTB Pega the new Application wizard allows us to create an application on one single build on application. I wanted to see if I can tweak the Pega’s OOTB App creation functionality and make it work for more than one built on application. I was successful but as we don’t have lot of documentation available I had to literally “Hack” into the system and find out how to do it. It costed me lot of time and energy and I failed 6 times. On the 7 attempt it started working for me.

Accomplishments that I am proud of

As of now with OOTB Pega the new Application wizard allows us to create an application on one single build on application. Developers need to add built on application later , also need to create the connection to reuse case types and data structure by hand. I am happy that I could attempt to make the automation done in this piece up to some extent. The solution makes the class structure and data structure automatically so that the citizen developer can get things readymade and coach do not have to create them by hand. I feel happy about it.

What I learnt

Its really complex to develop platforms for citizen developers. As these platforms needs to automate lot of work which a developer does in day to day life

What’s next

If the idea is likeable by the judges, I will consider my self lucky and will take next steps to help promote the features
I reused some internal rules ( In Practice we don’t do but since it’s a Hackathon I wanted to push myself to the limits ) . If Judges like it , I will like to take help from the Pega's engineering team to shape the solution in a better manner

All the icons I used in this project is from https://www.flaticon.com/. Its really cool