This year has marked a downturn for various industries. However, there are some that are actually enabling many to sail through the tough time. The software development industry is one of them.
Software applications, such as Slack, Zoom are enabling workspace-collaboration, cloud services are ensuring that there is remote access to infrastructure, software, data & information, chatbots are helping in various healthcare awareness campaigns. In one form or the other, software applications are aiding businesses to continue their services.
2020 is expected to experience high demand in performance-oriented, innovative, and scalable software applications. Considering this, it has become imperative for businesses and their development teams to follow the best development practices. The following segment discusses the top 5 software development trends that should be followed in 2020.
1. Modern Software Architectures will Gain Grounds
Software architectures lay down the basis of a solution. It defines how the components of a software system should be organized or assembled, how they communicate with each other, and what are the constraints that the whole system is ruled by.
Software architectures have evolved over time. For software development to cope with the COVID-19 effect, it is important to adopt architectures that promise scalability, fault isolation, helps in continuous development & deployment, code management, etc.
Microservices, micro frontends, serverless, component-based, or reactive are some of the modern architectures that are gaining ground. Serverless for flexible scaling, Microservices for modularity, Component-Based for faster time-to-market, Microfrontends for the codebase maintenance. Depending upon the business and project requirements, any of the modern software architectures can be chosen to build a strong basis for development.
2. Cloud Adoption will Remain MainstreamAccessibility, business continuity, high availability, disaster recovery are the watchwords these days. Cloud adoption is a one-stop solution to these business requirements. Cloud services help in CapEx/OpEx cost optimization, helps in capacity planning, enable following compliances, provide high availability/disaster recovery tools/services, optimize resource utilization & cost with Pay-as-you-go models.
To avail the benefits that Cloud offers, businesses can move from on-premise infrastructure to cloud or can migrate from one cloud service to another (Microsoft Azure to Amazon Web Services). Apart from this, new development projects can be built only using cloud infrastructure. Such solutions, called cloud-native applications frees the operations team from managing the infrastructure resources manually.
ALSO READ: How to Ensure Business Continuity Amid COVID-19 Crisis?
3. Transformational Technologies will Find More Use Cases in Software
A number of technologies have evolved with time, enabling businesses to offer out-of-the-box solutions to the customers. Transformational technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Internet of Things, Robotic Process Automation have started to find practical use cases in mobile solutions as well.
In a recent project for Reserve Bank of India (RBI), Daffodil made the best use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to help the visually impaired to identify Indian banknotes through a mobile aided note identifier. Moreover, chatbots, which is also one of the use cases of AI has mobile-centric opportunities.
Likewise, IoT, Blockchain, and other automation technologies are being used in mobile apps to improve their functionality. As the businesses realize the potential of these technologies, we are going to have more apps in 2020 that are based on them.
4. New Development Approaches will be at Forefront
With time, there is a paradigm shift in how software applications are developed. The approaches, methodologies, tools, programming languages used for development have changed a lot. For example, if we talk about project development methodologies, they have evolved from waterfall to Agile to DevOps. The advancement in these development approaches is bringing a change in an application’s time-to-market, performance, testing, development, team management, etc.
Likewise, new modes for infrastructure management are being introduced that allows application development at an optimized cost, helps in upfront capacity planning, compliance & security assurance, etc. The practice of managing delivery and consumption of software in a cloud computing environment, called CloudOps is booming in the software development industry.
In addition to this, new approaches for software development, such as bringing modularity in architecture, developing UI using reusable components are adopted to bring an overall improvement in an application’s development and delivery.
5. Software Outsourcing will Hold a Significant Value
There are a number of reasons for outsourcing to boom during and after the COVID-19 crisis. One is the new product ideas that will strike various businesses & individuals, and to execute them, many of them will look around for a technology partner to take it from ideation to implementation phase.
Outsourcing has a number of benefits amongst which cost optimization is the one. The reason being, the cost of hiring a team or adding members to it is lesser than setting up a development team. One can hire a team with a varied skill set, for any time span. Depending upon the project scope and requirements, any of the outsourcing model, such as team augmentation or product outsourcing can be chosen.
ALSO READ: 7 Reasons Why Outsourcing Software Development Works
Looking for a Technology Partner for Software Development?
We acknowledged the benefits of a versatile, scalable software application during and after the COVID-19 crisis, along with some best approaches for development. If you have an innovative app idea for an enterprise or a targetted set of customers, then you can connect with us.
Daffodil is a technology partner for hundreds of businesses across the globe and is helping many to materialize their app idea. Our team thoroughly analyzes the potential behind an idea and help in its development, deployment, and maintenance.