Software development
There are two major trends that have the potential to disrupt software development and influence the way we conduct business. The tightly linked trends of Low-Code/No-Code and Citizen Developer have the potential to disrupt our business in a way that we have not yet understood properly yet.
The concept of low-code or no-code is not foreign to us. Throughout the past 20 or 30 years there have been many attempts to develop platforms that a business user can use to generate a system without the need for a software developer. There were varying successes but none were sophisticated enough to make a significant impact. There is currently a resurrection of this concept and this time there are a few other trends that are supporting enough to make the adoption of these platforms much more widespread.
There were always citizen developers in the application development world. These were the wannabe developers or the more technical inclined business person that played after hours with tools like MS Access, Clarion, etc. and developed small systems or solutions that they used in their business environments. These solutions were typically only to assist in the business person's own daily activities and not often got wider adoption, mainly because IT departments refused to assist or support these endeavours.
Why would it be different this time, you might be asking. Well, in the current technological and exponential world we are living in the convergence of AI/ML, general acceptance of SAAS in the business world, the increased functionality and depth of the low-code platforms and the demand of digital transformation has created an optimal environment for these trends to thrive.
According to Gartner "by 2024, three-quarters of large enterprises will be using at least four low-code development tools for both IT application development and citizen development initiatives.”
Gartner further predicts that "By 2024, low-code application development will be responsible for more than 65% of application development activity.”
There is another trend who's intersection with the Low-Code/No-Code trend could have interesting consequences - Artificial intelligence (AI) and the specific application of AI in software development. AI helps us to code better, test better, help identifying vulnerabilities in our code and many other benefits. There are AI projects that can build web sites from basic written instructions or hand drawn designs. A few years ago we needed an analyst, a project manager, a graphics designer and a web developer to the same thing an AI solution can do in a few seconds.
As software development companies, how will these trends impact us? Does this mean we will be out of work in the next 4-5 years? Or will it change the nature of our business? How will it impact our business models? Is a software developer a dying breed or are we at the start of a bright new future?
What do you think?
Technologist, Developer, Architect, Enthusiast.
4 年Low code/ nocode will take care of the low hanging fruit. To stay relevant in future software development your team better have something to offer higher up the tech tree. Building capture screens and CRUD with some reporting used to be the lifeblood of software development. No one will want to pay for that anymore, unless it is customer facing and the look and feel needs to be unique. I see designer skills becoming more valuable, and moderately skilled programmers becoming less valuable. With top tech talent becoming more jn demand than ever. AI is not likely to revolutionize software development at scale in the next 10 years. It will build up slowly, AI cannot innovate yet, so it must learn every process and domain pattern. This means that it will conquer one domain and then move on to the next. There is also no company actually presenting AI driven self writing software that is anything but vaporware, research material or the same old platform with a ‘now with ML’ sticker.