Software Development Trends To Look Out For In 2022

Trends evolve or change with time. Whatever the industry, what’s trending at the moment won’t stay in trend for too long. Either it will get replaced with something better when outdated or there will be some enhancements in the previous trends. It’s important for any business to stay updated with the latest trends in their industry to ensure that their customers receive the best (and latest) experience and the business isn’t behind in the competitive race.

Like every other industry trends, the same will be witnessed in software development going forward in 2022, and developers would need to be eagled-eye towards these trends. The practices that you currently follow may get redundant in the nearby future. Software development companies need to be aware of these trends and be well-informed about them as to what they bring in and how they are going to revamp the existing process. Also, being well-versed in those trends help companies strategize accordingly during software development.

In this blog post, we would discuss a few software development trends that will play a crucial role in 2022.

Software Development Trends 2022

Here are some of the latest trends that we would likely see in the software development industry in 2022 and beyond.

1. Enhanced Cybersecurity

The major shift to online platforms especially in this pandemic era has exposed weak links in digital spaces. Cyber-attacks have scaled up of late, and if not dealt with utmost care and attention can cost businesses millions of dollars.

2022 calls for a different cyber security approach than the conventional methods like establishing a perimetric firewall or anti-malware application. Cyber attackers are coming up with various techniques to break into the system software. Implementing cyber security mesh during development can be an ideal way to counter these threats. To understand what a cybersecurity mesh is, it is a practice of implementing IT security infrastructure that independently secures each device with its own perimeter at the time of development. This makes it extremely tough for cybercriminals to exploit an entire network. This strategy also involves security testing by the DevOps team during the development phase to eliminate any vulnerabilities.

Read: Everything You Need To Know About Penetration Testing

2. Low Code Development

Another latest software development is low code development. As the name suggests, low code development refers to developing software applications with low or minimal coding. Lesser coding means that the application is developed faster. It uses a graphical user interface for development purpose rather than hand-coded programming. With a low code application development platform in place, one can leverage visual deployment tools such as drag-and-drop modelers and point-and-click interface creation for faster development, deployment, and maintenance of business applications.

Low code development has been quite impressive and talked about a lot in recent years, and is expected to gain traction in the coming years. A majority of businesses have shown a great interest in low code development which makes it one of the trends to look out for in 2022. It’s a perfect option for startups to quickly validate business ideas and test them with their target users.

Also Read: Low Code vs Traditional Development

3. Anywhere Operations

Anywhere Operations is an IT model that involves delivering customer/clients needs and support, virtual employee access, employee motivation & support, and even product deployment without being physically present or with no regard to the physical location of assets or people. It is often mistaken for remote working, which shouldn’t be the case, as Anywhere Operations is a much broader concept (that involves collaboration tools, reliance on cloud technologies, etc) and remote working is just a small part of it.

The concept of AO was already in place a few years back but it wasn’t widely adopted. The unfortunate arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic just accelerated the adoption of the AO model across the globe. And it would be no surprise to see the AO technology trend becoming even more popular among organizations or software development companies in 2022 to ensure pre-pandemic productivity.

4. Shift to Consolidated DevOps Toolchains and Pipelines

Forrester, a market research firm, reports that various organizations have already shifted to consolidated test frameworks and predicts that we would witness the same happening with the DevOps tools in 2022. They say that this will enable automated governance and compliance, further adoption of GitOps, and utilization of value stream management tools. GitOps encompasses a set of DevOps practices to manage infrastructure and application configurations through an open-source control version system called Git. It assists developers in managing infrastructure using the same tools and processes used in software development such as version control, collaboration, compliance, CI/CD.

As per the same market research firm, the new DevOps system would likely become platform-as-a-service for being largely hosted. For development teams, this would mean that development cycles can be automated, from build to infrastructure deployment, without necessarily having to deploy the infrastructure itself.

5. Distributed Cloud Technologies

This is one of the major trends that would shape application development going forward in 2022. Although cloud computing isn’t a new concept, the way it is being used in a distributed manner has significantly enhanced user experience lately.

Startups should adopt the distributed cloud topology where backend services run on different cloud providers at different geographical locations, instead of hosting them on a single server. This proves extremely helpful at times when there’s an issue with one of the servers as this doesn’t affect the app operation. In other words, it prevents service disruption and data loss.

6. Continuous Delivery Would Be Must

Continuous Delivery (CD) is a modern-day software/application development practice where code changes such as the addition of new features, configuration changes, bug fixes are deployed into a production environment safely and quickly, in a sustainable manner. In this process, developers frequently hand the updated code to the QA and Operation team for testing in order to make the application quickly available for the end-users.

By adopting the Continuous Delivery approach, the process of identifying issues and implementing feedback becomes more efficient and less costly. For SMEs, it’s important to make the development team capable of working in shorter sprints. In 2022 and coming years, more and more software development companies will adopt the continuous delivery approach.

7. Outsourcing

Most organizations these days prefer to outsource software development, and this trend will continue to boom as we move ahead in 2022. Companies find outsourcing development services a better option than having a specific in-house team. This is due to the many perks that outsourcing offers, such as experts handling your projects, cost-efficiency, and primarily that outsourcing allows you to shift your complete focus to your other business operations.

Startups make a major contribution to the outsourcing trend scaling up. And why shouldn’t they? Outsourcing not only reduces their IT-related costs but also mitigates risks and boosts efficiency.

Final Word

These are some of the software development trends for 2022. If we talk about the software development technologies that are going to lead in 2022, React, Kotlin, Swift, JavaScript, and TypeScript are some of the programming languages that can be expected to rule software development in 2022.

With a better understanding of these trends, organizations can ensure that any software they build is future-proof and also that they don’t lag in the competitive race.

Do let us know in the comment section below which software development trend are you likely to adopt in your strategy.