With the New Year now upon us, it becomes a great time to take a look at some of the major trends impacting the world of software development. Understanding the shifts in a continually evolving industry helps position your application engineering team for success both now and in the future. Maybe your shop is already part of making these trends the new reality in the technology sector?
Last year, we talked about the use of ChatOps for software development teams, allowing engineers and QA staff to use smart chatbots to streamline portions of the process. Users can easily start builds, test scripts, automate virtual environments, and more using a simple messaging app that keeps the entire team in the loop.
One of the most popular technology trends for 2017 is the increased use of chatbots and Business Bots throughout the business world. Expect chatbot usage to greatly expand among software developers. The era of DevOps requires efficiency, communication, and collaboration, with chatbots and ChatOps making life easier for all.
Another notable 2017 business trend is Advanced Collaboration, and the use of chatbots is helping to make this reality happen for developers and other departments within many technology businesses.
Mobile apps have been around since before the introduction of the iPhone. Their increased use at businesses of all sizes – especially at smaller organizations – is a predicted trend in the tech world for 2017. Nearly half of all small businesses are expected to leverage mobile apps in their daily operations over the next year, according to the mobile development platform, Biznessapps.
Software development shops focusing on business apps need to look at ramping up their Android and iOS development efforts. Java remains the language of choice for the majority of Android projects, while Swift is gaining on Objective-C for iOS initiatives.
Many businesses strive for continuous deployment to stay competitive in the modern business world. This is one of the reasons for the popularity of Agile as a methodology and DevOps or Tribes as an organizational structure. This places the onus on development teams to leverage a wide variety of tools to make processes more efficient, like Docker for migrating applications across virtual production, development, and QA environments.
In 2017, Docker, as well as other package-based tools, are expected to become commonplace at shops across most business sectors. Vagrant, which works like Docker but is able to package an entire environment, is another similar application now becoming the standard for managing virtual development environments. Virtualization and packages are now a must for nearly all application engineering shops.
As more and more mobile devices connect to the Internet – with their users expecting a seamless experience – servers on the Cloud need to prevent becoming bogged down in a massive amount of traffic and requests. Enter functional programming. Functional languages, like Clojure and Scala, are essentially stateless, allowing them to run more efficiently in parallel on servers using different processor cores or in distributed environments.
2017 is expected to see a rise in popularity of these and other functional programming languages, given the continued growth of the Cloud and mobile device connectivity.
Keep an eye on these trends throughout the upcoming year to see if they come to fruition. Check back regularly at the Betica Blog for additional dispatches from the world of software development. Thanks for reading!
Posted on January 6, 2017 | Categories Software Development | Tags ChatOps, Docker, Software Development, Software Testing, Swift