To keep customers happy, organisations need to constantly adopt and develop new technology, according to Forrester.

The software development industry has gone through changes with agile, DevOps, microservices, and low-code approaches over the last two years.

Next year, according to Forrester’s predictions for 2018, modern software development is going to continue as new innovations are made.

Forrester said in a report: “The truism has become true: Every company is in the software business. As software becomes the central differentiating factor in customer engagement, an effective, well-aligned software factory is an increasingly crucial business imperative.”

Forrester said to the SD Times the software industry should be prepared for the following changes in 2018:

• Devtest bots will be used to automate delivery: While automation is not a new concept, Forrester believes machine learning and artificial intelligence will continue to replace manual and repetitive tasks through bots.
• DevOps tools will proliferate and consolidate: In 2018, DevOps teams will look to use a single vendor for their CI/CD solutions rather than using a custom built development toolchain approach.
• Agile will continue to scale: Agile will slowly, but steadily continue to scale. According to Forrester, enterprise agile adoption grew to 59% in 2017, compared to its 23% in 2015.
• DevOps will drive the use of APIs and microservices: The need for digital transformation will force businesses to invest in APIs and microservices as well as build their development lifecycle around automation.
• New software jobs will emerge: Project managers, manual testers, database administrators and basic developers will transform into product manager, scrum master, test engineer, data scientist, low-code developer and business expert roles.
• Serverless programming patterns will take over: Serverless architectures will take over containers and virtual machines in order for developers to separate business logic from infrastructure code, and build more modern applications.
• Low-code features will continue to advance: New low-code features will emerge to address “special requirements of digital process automation, dynamic case management, content management, eCommerce, business intelligence, and analytics.”
• There will be an increased interest in AR development: New software development kits like Apple’s ARKit and Google’s ARCore are removing the barriers to augmented reality development.
• Conversational computing will be more common: As voice recognition, natural language processing, natural language classification, and natural language generation continue to advance, conversational computing will become more popular next year.

Forrester added to the SD Times: “For AD&D leaders, 2018 will be a year of parallel initiatives. First, they will continue on their journey toward modern software development practices and architectures — agile, DevOps, microservices, and automation — that underpin continuous delivery. At the same time, they will take on new opportunities that new technologies and platforms — especially AI and low-code — will present.”

Written by Leah Alger