The pandemic has changed the way we work forever. Remote work is here to stay, and digital transformation is no longer optional for any company that wants to stay competitive. All this means tech workers are more sought after than ever.
69% of boards of directors say they accelerated their digital transformation because of Covid-19, according to a survey by Gartner. They’re mainly focusing on contactless services (60.1%), migration to the Cloud (52.25%), and DevOps (51.75%).
This will drive some of 2022’s key software development trends:
1. Cloud Everything
In 2022 and beyond, everything that can migrate to the Cloud will migrate to the Cloud. Take onboarding, for instance. Newly hired devs often spend their first couple of weeks struggling to get everything running on their local machine. It’s a huge waste of time both for them and for their colleagues.
But with most staging environments, automated builds, and running production applications already in the Cloud, local development environments are the logical next step.
Amazon and Microsoft are already working on this. Microsoft's GitHub Codespaces and Amazon’s AWS Cloud9, both released in 2021, offer development environments accessible in seconds on browsers.
2. DevOps
“Elite performing engineering organisations are twice as likely to achieve their organisational goals and achieve a 50% higher growth rate over three years”, according to Google’s DORA.
To speed up pipelines and get new functionality delivered quickly, teams will have to optimise their processes and tools, removing obstacles and bottlenecks. That means DevOps and practices that facilitate constant delivery will be key.
3. AI-assisted Development
AI has already started making an appearance in development tools like IBM AI for Code, GitHub Copilot, and Oracle’s new query language generator.
Forrester “expects to see AI bots in nearly all development tools, adding natural language and other capabilities to the developer’s toolbox” in 2022.
4. Low-code Platforms
Classified as “extraordinarily disruptive” by Forbes in 2017, low-code platforms are now trending more than ever. Gartner predicts that “by 2024, low-code application development will be responsible for more than 65% of application development activity.”