Top software development technology trends for 2022

After a year and more into the pandemic, we all live in the digital world, and we speak software language. In our day-to-day business and personal lives, the software is how we connect and respond. While software development technologies are already making the lightning shift, new trends are on the way in 2022.

Here’s the selection of a few technology trends that will change the software world:

The rise of citizen developers

Business leaders are quickly agreeing to the fact that empowering business functions with custom and modernized applications is a major business priority. As per recent research, the custom application development service market is set to grow by USD 31.76 billion from 2021 to 2025 at a CAGR of 7.93%.

By and large, they are struggling with the severe talent crunch. This must change if organizations need to succeed with limited technical skills while balancing speed, and quality. In 2022, Organizations will embrace No-Code and Low-Code platforms to build applications with the help of business users, giving rise to Citizen Developers. This will make Citizen Development a new arm of software development.

Experience engineering

Experience engineering sits at the intersection of design experience, communications, new-age technologies, and outcomes. In 2022, organizations will make investments in building immaculate digital experiences. Experience engineering involves employing artificial intelligence, machine learning and reasoning, Big Data, IoT, and cloud computing in their most-refined forms.

When I say most refined it means – building self-learning systems, decision intelligence based on real-time data, smart supply chains, and everything happening within nanoseconds -- no room for downtime, errors, and glitches. Experience engineering will start from human-centric design, and will extend up to engineering wonders where everything will be driven by customers’ experiences.

Composable applications

Now, more than ever, businesses are in desperate need of building composable applications. A volatile mix of changing customers’ expectations, disruptive technologies, regulatory demands, and competitive challenges is putting significant pressure on businesses to expedite innovation and build better applications – without disturbing the legacy systems.

Composable applications are at the heart of this process. Composable applications work on the principles of Agility, Speed, Orchestration, and Resilience. This means any module of a business application can be decoupled making it easier to slice and dice the various components to add new functionality leading to rapid innovation.

With the rise of infrastructure-as-code, infrastructure-as-application, interoperable applications in multi-cloud environment, microservices, and APIfication, businesses are all set to develop and adopt composable applications. In 2022, we will see and hear a lot of businesses making strides in building business-facing internal applications using composable architectures.

Edge computing

Gartner predicted two years ago that by 2025, a whopping 75% of enterprise data would be generated and processed at “the edge.” Put another way, in five years, most enterprise data could bypass the cloud entirely.

Every application – be it patient monitoring or grocery or financial transactions generates huge amounts of data. This data needs to be processed faster by removing latency in sending data to the cloud and retrieving results. Edge computing makes it possible by using smart devices that include capturing data using sensors, processing it on the edge cloud, and displaying the final output to the end-users.

Zero-trust architectures

The traditional perimeter-based security measures like firewalls, browser isolations, end-point vulnerability scanners are failing, thanks to the expanding threat surface owning to remote workers, integrated applications, public Wifis, APIs, and usage of open source libraries.

Against this backdrop, Zero-trust architectures are the need of the hour. Assuming there are no “threat-free” environment and “trust nothing, verify everything”, in 2022, organizations will invest in multi-factor authentication, endpoint security technologies, advanced AI-ML threat detection and prevention systems, deception technologies, and verify user and systems identity each time the access is granted.

Wrapping up
In software development, it’s critical to understand and acknowledge changing winds of customers’ expectations and the shifting competitive landscape. A thorough understanding of software development trends, risks, and the vision to leverage technology as a differentiating factor put businesses a few years ahead of their competition. Leaders must be at the forefront driving these initiatives.

Qentelli is a services provider helping organizations bring their native mindset in to the digital medium using technology as an enabler positively contributing to top-line and bottom-line. We accelerate such transformational engagements through the adoption of mainstream technologies such as DevOps, and automation, and cutting-edge technologies, such as ML, deep Learning; and our home-grown AI-infused frameworks.

-- Prasanna Singaraju, Co-Founder and Chief Digital Officer, Qentelli.