Software Development Trends Your Company Should Be Following In 2016

Staying on top of the software industry means constantly evolving, and when it comes to software development, this evolution is fast-paced. As we draw closer to the midpoint of this year, it’s essential to remain cognizant of the popular software trends that have emerged in 2016 and implement those that apply to your business strategies.

Quality Assurance Software Offerings

This is not so much a trend but an essential facet of any development process, but companies are making strides towards better quality assurance in 2016 with the use of ALM software. One of the largest factors in assuring quality assurance is a streamlined, cohesive team effort towards the end development goal, and with almost every industry moving towards outsourcing efforts for steep savings, ALM software can give real-time insight into whether your product is developing as planned and working as promised. As development teams are increasingly geographically distributed, maintaining a common work space with the ability to track projects becomes priority. ALM software allows development teams to continuously track each other’s progress in real time, providing automated testing throughout the process that can catch bugs and other issues before expensive reworks become necessary. These tools enable any person on the team to determine what portion of the project has been worked on and what changes have been implemented, allowing for a more comprehensive understanding of the entire development process.

DevOps Efforts

Companies have increasingly adopted DevOps practices to ensure a cohesive team process. DevOps is a somewhat complex theme, but can be simply defined as a practice that sees a cohesive work force of operations and development engineers participating during the entire lifecycle of software development, all the way to production support. While DevOps can be defined differently depending on the industry and individual interpretation of the process, it’s generally taken to mean a collaboration between the developer and operations teams. It’s not hard to understand why companies are accelerating their use of this practice, as it encourages communication and promotes collaboration.

Safeguarding Vulnerabilities

Companies in 2016 are majorly focused on protecting and safeguarding their software and the clients who use it. After multiple hacks and security breaches in recent years didn’t discriminate between industries—companies ranging from Ashley Madison to Target were affected—companies are on red alert. Mobile is king and becomes more popular with each passing day, but mobile apps and sites area easy to target and therefore more vulnerable to security breaches. A focus on better encryption and secure servers is now on the forefront of everyone’s minds.

On Cloud Nine

Companies are using big data more than ever in 2016, and these massive data sets are so large and complex that traditional data processing applications simply won’t do the trick. Moving to cloud computing is no longer an option, it’s an essential for companies of all types. Cloud computing allows access to an unlimited numbers of servers, allows for virtualization within development platforms and external services, and improves the speed at which code can be branched and merged.

A Switch in Coding

While it used to be that fluency in Java was paramount for job-searching developers, this year has seen the emergence of new coding languages and a gradual abandoning of Java as the main coding language for new technology. Students are increasingly turning to coding classes that give them a more comprehensive understanding of coding languages and introduce them to the burgeoning options. While Java definitely won’t disappear, companies and individuals alike will see a major impact resulting from the continued veering away from this prevalent coding choice.

The Rise of Containers

Containers come into use when developers need to move from one computing environment to another, whether this move is based from a laptop to a testing system, or from a physical data processing application to a virtual space in the cloud. Containers offer an application, its dependencies, libraries, and configuration files all in one neat little package. Separating the application from an operating system’s physical infrastructure allows it to become virtualized and more easily accessed. While software containers have been around in some form or another for years, it didn’t come to today’s level of popularity until Docker released its toolset, and it seems companies are taking note, with a variety of competitors coming out of the woodwork with their own wares. In a nutshell, containers allow companies to waste fewer resources and offer better security features.

These trends are seeing their heyday within the software industry, and are proving to be essential to successful development efforts. Determine which of these would best benefit your company and implement them to streamline your processes.