Software development has grown by leaps and bounds over the past several years, becoming enmeshed with almost every aspect of modern business, entertainment, and day-to-day life. Software advances are revolutionizing the way we look at and interact with the world around us. Let’s take a look at the overall trends guiding software development, both technically and philosophically, moving forward.
Technical Changes
Development is moving faster than ever, cascading from a spring source of both an increasingly vast set of technological paradigms and a shift toward open source and crowd source development. Moving forward, utilizing source code, creating open source projects, and being an active part of the open source community will become essential to successful project completion within tighter time constraints. Development professionals failing to actively embrace the open source world will find themselves becoming disenfranchised from state-of-the-art technology and the technology community in general.
Limits to software architecture are becoming a problem of the past as huge developments in serverless architecture, XaaS, and microservices change the playing field. These emergent technologies allow for compartmentalization of portions of software architecture, making projects more resilient and scalable than ever. Continuous deployment models should soon be the norm.
Machine learning has moved from theoretical to pragmatic in the past years, and will continue to redefine the way we view human relationships with technology. This adaptive AI technology allows computers to learn without being programmed, changing as new data is introduced. We can expect to see voice-driven apps and infrastructure automation powered by machine learning to begin saturating the tech market.
Philosophical Changes
Software development has moved out of a traditional technology environment and has effectively become the backbone driving all modern businesses. Often stated as “all business is software business,” the critical role of developers in the center of shifting views on data collection and communication is not overstated. Developers are creating the products that collect and interpret data, inform stakeholders across industries and sectors, shape customer interaction, determine data dissemination, and drive markets. As we see technology pushing every aspect of business, leaders suggest that ethics models, public interest protocols, and security measures need to be rapidly developed to match the altered business world.
New focuses on customer-driven development will lead the field moving forward. Historically, much development has had a product downward approach; a product is developed to be sold to a customer base who has not requested or informed its development. Now, as technology spreads throughout ever further reaching enterprises, a smart and sophisticated customer base is the best driver of smart and sophisticated software. Projects without strong end-user push and input will have trouble competing in the highly connected networks we will look at in the near future.