The Impact of Software Development in the New Normal

Are you delivering continuous software innovation to your business? 

IT experts have embraced working remotely and distance collaboration has become the new normal for software development practices.  

The pandemic will pass at some point, but the impact of digital transformation will live on. Software development has never been more important than now and tech innovation is part of the recovery plan of every business. This necessity to stay up with technology and creating a digital transformation plan is reflecting on the current demand for IT developers in the market. 

Covid-19 has taught us that we need to learn and adapt, businesses all over the world are facing similar challenges:  

• Are we focusing on new priorities? 
  
• Are we moving forward or playing it safe?  
  
• Are we using existing technologies or implementing new ones? 

The current situation has forced us to become more creative. Trends such as digital transformation and automation have become necessary solutions for companies that want to take the leap forward and maintain or develop a competitive advantage. In reality, every company now finds itself as a technology company. How we handle this will help us take our rightful place in this new era. With or without a pandemic we were destined to reach digital transformation at some point, we just got there faster than many of us were expecting. 

Jeffrey Hammond, Vice President, and Principal Analyst of Forrester released the 2021 predictions for software development in which he provides important insights about the new ways software development will take next year. 

• Accelerated adoption of low-code platforms will change how teams organize. During the pandemic, many organizations embraced low-code platforms to build and deploy new apps fast. These experiences will drive most development shops to adopt low-code tools and more.  
  
• Long-term remote working will increase the importance of digital collaboration. As our remote reality continues, digital tools that enable “spiritual co-location” will become more important. Developers will need to make better use of collaborative work and value stream management tools, as well as new cloud-based team enablers like shared codespaces and pipelines. 
  
• Modernization efforts will put pressure on developers to master new skills. Almost three-quarters of infrastructure and operation pros report that migrating existing apps to cloud platforms is a priority of their enterprise’s cloud strategy. It is developers that will need to containerize and refactor these monoliths. 
  
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) will drive more development automation. More than a third of developers will use machine learning in 2021 to automate development activities. Teams will use machine learning models to make test automation smarter, and natural language processing will be used to review test cases and eliminate duplicates, as well as identify gaps in test coverage.  

Digital transformation is not a luxury, but a legitimate and trustworthy solution of the new era. This is for not only internal use but external as well.  Building a culture that allows developers to work remotely will make outsourcing a complete game-changer.  Adopting new global business models will let nearshore companies become ideal partners all while reducing the risks with cost-effective solutions coupled with high-quality standards. 

The research of Accelerated Strategies Group “The Future of Remote Work and Software Development” shows us the long-term impact of a decentralized workforce on software development and delivery.  It demonstrates how organizations and software teams are adapting to remote work. ASG interviewed 347 industry leaders from around the world to collect and analyze data on the impact of COVID-19 on software teams. 

Up to 51.75% of the respondents said the pandemic has increased their focus on DevOps initiatives, 52.25% increased their progress on migration to cloud services providers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform) and 59.49% of the industry leaders said their software teams are significantly more productive than pre-pandemic. 

NTConsult is a leading Global Custom Software Development and IT Staff Augmentation Organization. We build first class solutions for your organization and we augment your team with best in the class resources.