Software Development Predictions for 2023
"A new year, a new you," as the saying goes. For software-engineering organizations, the same applies. 2023 appears ripe to be a year for reinvention in the AppDev world, particularly when it comes to efficiency.
Some of our contributors focused on this aspect when making enterprise-IT predictions for 2023, highlighting what a complex and expensive landscape in which we are all starting out the new year. TechBeacon contributors echoed these sentiments when asked to make software-development predictions. Good is fine, but fast and affordable are better.
So if you're a software developer or tester (or a stakeholder adjacent to software development and/or testing), what can you expect the new year to bring to the new you? Here's what a few of our contributors from 2022 had to say:
The citizen-developer movement will fizzle out.
"The end of citizen development is coming. With a global recession either here or looming (depending on whom you talk to), making employees with regular day jobs spend extra time building their own automation solutions is of dubious value. Asking every citizen to become not just a developer but also an IT manager—because they’ll have to curate those applications—is too much to ask. Instead, companies will have to consider making the problem owner part of the solution designer."
—Mike Fitzmaurice, vice president for North America, WEBCON
Ditto for DevOps, which will be displaced by platform engineering.
"With the rapid development of Kubernetes and cloud-native applications, organizations are realizing the inadequacies of their IT teams to leverage DevOps practices. We've seen that a DevOps workload is difficult to practice in small and medium-sized enterprises, as well as in large enterprises that lack sufficient talent. The gradually accumulated cognitive load ultimately leads to a less agile and less efficient collaboration between teams. Given these issues, more organizations in 2023 will reassess the DevOps model and adopt platform engineering as an alternative. With the rapid development of cloud-native applications, platform engineering will gradually replace DevOps in many organizations by providing an internal developer platform (IDP) that provides a 'golden path' to more easily deploy, manage, and scale Kubernetes and applications on top."
—Tobi Knaup, CEO and co-founder, D2iQ
Efficiency, not art: Application factories will become essential.
"The demand we saw during 2020 for digitalization and new applications seems to be here to stay, at least through 2023. Needing applications on a massive scale [means that companies need] factories, not art studios. The implementation of 'application factories' means optimization of processes and the ability to better hit compliance standards across the board."
—Mike Fitzmaurice, vice president for North America, WEBCON
Organizations will prioritize easy-to-maintain technology . . .
"Accelerated digital transformation has led to more distributed IT infrastructures, with Kubernetes becoming the de facto standard for managing containerized environments. Although there are many benefits to using Kubernetes in hybrid and multi-cloud environments, Kubernetes is a complex technology that requires deep technical skills to deploy and manage. Because Kubernetes is a relatively new technology, the talent pool of skilled Kubernetes engineers is limited. This is why we expect to see organizations gradually abandon DIY Kubernetes projects and put their budgets toward training and technology for their Kubernetes deployments and projects. Considering the economic uncertainty over the next year, CIOs and business decision makers are being forced to look at their budgets closely and be more selective on which technology investments to move forward with. One critical factor during this time is the growing skills gap in emerging technology sectors. In an effort to bridge this gap, technology and tools that are both impacting the business's bottom line and easy to deploy and maintain will rise to top priority."
—Tobi Knaup, CEO and co-founder, D2iQ
. . . but developers will have to up their security game to keep their companies competitive.
"Going forward, software developers and vendors cannot separate security from their application development and deployment process. For businesses buying third-party applications, security is no longer an afterthought. A G2 survey shows more than eight of ten software buyers say the kind of security the software vendor provides is either important or very important—and four out of five buyers consider the history of vendors with data breaches. Developers must build and maintain security in their software applications if they want more users."
—Soundarya Jayaraman, writer, G2
After Thanksgiving, tech pubs will start working on next year's predictions.
As you can see, this is a long-term trend that will continue. The only question is as to whether I'll be putting such an article together or whether TechBeacon will fire all the editors and hire a generative artificial-intelligence (AI) tool such as ChatGPT.
—Joe Stanganellli, assistant managing editor, TechBeacon