
Authored by: Mark Weaser, Vice President – OutSystems, APAC
With digital transformation initiatives accelerating, enterprises are struggling to keep up with the growing demand for digital services and products, especially as tech stacks constantly change and new cloud services pop up.
The revolution of hybrid work and subsequent acceleration of digital services brought on by the pandemic resulted in backlogs for software dev teams across every industry. Coupled with the shortage of full-time developers, there has been a demand for software engineering teams to modernise their teams, practices and tools. Here are seven software development trends that will impact the industry.
DevSecOps
Security will continue to be a priority concern for software engineering teams and IT executives. The increased risk with collaborative development, ransomware attacks, undefined boundaries for organisational data and regulatory requirements, have led to an uptick for DevSecOps, where compliance and security requirements are validated throughout the development lifecycle.
There has been a trend with CIOs and CISOs preferring to create new mobile and web application platforms that manage all stages of app development and delivery. The ultimate goal is for dev platforms to simplify dev teams to create secure code, assuming a Zero Trust security model instead of relying mostly on security testing methodologies.
Hybrid Integrations
According to The State of SaaS Sprawl in 2021, only 45% of SaaS apps are used on a regular basis, while 56% of these apps are shadow IT, or owned and managed outside of IT. These apps have to integrate with all the existing software packages and systems of records that they already have to run the core of their business. To achieve smooth integration, agile businesses are using rapid app changes with low-code application development platforms. Today, there is a greater need for organisations to connect their data management, governance and auditability across multiple data sources, in real-time. This demands more tools in hybrid integrations. The right low-code application development platforms or dedicated tools will allow data integrations from different SaaS and legacy systems, which is key to supporting business leaders to make data-driven decisions.
Low Code
There has been strong interest in the adoption of low-code platforms, especially with how it provides abstraction to remove the complexity that developers typically face when creating a system or app. Low-code platforms can come in to take over repetitive tasks like code validation, automatic builds and dependency management, allowing developers to focus on innovation and solve today’s most complex coding challenges.
Cloud-Native Platforms
The boom of cloud applications has changed the mindset of “build vs buy”—with SaaS sprawl not only straining on original budgets, but also leading to another form of technical debt for organisations who do not properly plan their business digitalisation plan.
Customers, partners and employees looking to recover business agility in enterprise systems demands a new type of cloud-native app development—one that is highly distributed and scalable, and enables the development of resilient, fit-to-purpose enterprise apps that increases the agility of the organisation.
There has been extensive growth from web services over the last five years, from 20 to up to 250 by a single IaaS provider today, and it is rapidly becoming a massive distraction for business developers creating cloud-native applications.
“The revolution of hybrid work and subsequent acceleration of digital services brought on by the pandemic resulted in backlogs for software dev teams across every industry. Coupled with the shortage of full-time developers, there has been a demand for software engineering teams to modernise their teams, practices and tools.”
It is essential for cloud-native development platforms to overcome these challenges by allowing dev teams to stay focused on value stream management for their digital products, instead of exhausting their engineering talents on infrastructure management alone.
Along with the race against tech giants to hire engineers in a limited pool of talents, organisations need to innovate and stay competitive with their own teams. This means turning to technology to remove technical complexity and allow their development teams to focus on business outcomes and innovation, like a new crop of cloud-native low-code platforms.
DesignOps
DesignOps is a tightly knit team with close collaboration between design teams and front-end developers, promoting collaboration across the different product teams within an organisation, and ensuring consistency of the product’s experience from the first delivery.
As businesses get pressured to meet user adoption goals by launching more digital productions, they need to manage design at scale, while minimising technical and UX debt, bringing DesignOps practices to the center of the stage.
Observability
Going hand-in-hand with DesignOps, engineering leaders should invest in observability for hyperadoption. Merging new end-user behavior observability and support on open standards like Open Telemetry for tracing with plans to expand their use for logs and metrics, more digital product teams will aim for user adoption levels that were historically hard to achieve.
PWA-First
Progressive Web Apps, or PWAs combine the functions of native websites and apps accessibility without involving the app stores. Like native apps, PWAs can work offline, access device hardware and send push notifications. The user experiences are similar to native apps on mobile and desktop devices without downloading or updating hassles, which comes with great benefits—they run well on top of poor connectivity.
Overall, these trends represent a shift in software development and are reminders of how the digital space is rapidly accelerating. Businesses looking to stay ahead have to continuously adapt their teams and modernise in tandem to trends, or risk being left behind.


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