Software Engineering Insights

Books and their inexhaustible wisdom is no more limited to startups, students, or newbies in the industry. Bill Gates reportedly reads 50 books a year. Mark Zuckerberg reads a new book every two weeks and has a book club named ‘A Year of Books’

Enterprise software takes up a large part of IT budgets. With organizations aggressively investing in digital initiatives, there is a wide range of dissimilar and disconnected applications that have become a part of their portfolio. In response, CIOs are putting in continuous efforts to rebalance their technology portfolio, prioritizing their investments in the most efficient and much-needed software applications. 

When legacy systems hold back the business growth, IT teams race to modernize the existing solutions, thereby creating new business value out of them. The process involves technical or functional improvements, which may range anywhere between rewriting code, migration to a different platform, changing the architecture, or even replacing the entire system with a newer one.

Quite similar to the software development cycle, robotic process automation (RPA) is a strategic approach to automation. It requires thorough planning, defining timelines, managing resources, understanding compliances, and a lot more. That is why, RPA is considered as a journey, which comprises of 4 major steps for its successful implementation. 

Software Reliability Engineering and DevOps are two sought after disciplines, trying to maintain a balance between the software engineering and operations team. Since both approaches seem to sort similar problems, there is confusion if they are similar or can be used interchangeably. 

Building a software application is a complex process, comprising of a number of elements of which coding is just a small part. In general, a software engineering cycle looks something like this: 

GrubHub, AirBnB, Uber, Spotify, Zillow, Doordash. These are a few examples of successful businesses that have one thing in common- a creative software application. Today, it is hard to think of a business that goes without a software application. That is why, software development is a billion-dollar market, projected to reach $507B by 2020. 

The microservices architecture is gaining traction for breaking down the limitations of monolithic backends. Fault isolation, technology independence, continuous development & deployment, easy scaling are some of the significant benefits that microservices brings in. 

“We see our customers as invited guests to the party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.” - Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon

Whether a startup or a fortune 500 company like Amazon, businesses understand that customers and their satisfaction is the prime contributors to their success. That is why, businesses are investing in customer service that’s quick, interactive, and responsive.

Requirement gathering, design, development, testing, deployment, maintainenece. While an ideal software development process looks something like this, it is not the same in the real world. A development team encounters a number of roadblocks and technical debt is one amongst them.