Six Predictions for Software Development In 2024

Originally published on VM Blog.

In many ways, 2023 was a “Wild West” year for software development. Development cycles kept getting shorter, the complexity of releases exponentially increased, and shift left testing put tremendous strain on testing teams, who raced to keep up. At the same time, the emergence of Generative AI disrupted almost everything, with those machine learning solutions putting coding and testing into hyperdrive, leaving humans to figure out how to manage it all.

So, what’s next? I predict 2024 will see the software development industry “metabolize” these new trends and technologies, establishing new workflows, fixing old bottlenecks, finding new ones, and rewriting job descriptions. In short, 2024 will be the year of finding the new norm for software development.

1.  Multi-Cloud DevOps Environments Will Prompt Tech Stack Changes

More and more companies will transition to multi-cloud and hybrid development environments. This trend was accelerated by the huge spike in remote work during the pandemic, and that new norm will only continue next year. This will motivate companies to make the leap and adopt truly cloud-native solutions, allowing their teams to work seamlessly across environments.

2.  Security and Compliance Will Climb Priority Lists

As the rate of releases climbs, the volume of data balloons, and more and more work takes place in the cloud, maintaining security and compliance will become even more important-and challenging. Trustworthiness will emerge as a key differentiating factor among developers, and to earn and keep that reputation, more and more companies will shift left their security measures.

Just as continuous testing is now standard for competitive developers, security measures will continue to become more integrated into the software development lifecycle. Security testing, code analysis, pre-and-post-deployment audits-all these will soon be table stakes for developers looking to maintain security while keeping pace with competitors.

3.  AI Helpers Will Generate Code…and Risks

With generative AI and other AI-powered tools, developers in 2024 will produce code at rates never seen before. This will intensify the race to market among competitors, but it will also require close human analysis to mitigate risks. Generative AI tools “learn” from massive amounts of public code in order to generate code for new products. The issue is that whole swaths of that public code is actually subject to restrictive licensing conditions. Even the best AI tools sometimes fail to flag those conditions. That miss can be extremely costly for that business, which is why chatbots writing software code will need careful human supervision (probably assisted by yet another AI tool).

4.  Automated QA Will Keep Raising the Software Bar

The automated testing market is expected to grow from $20 billion in 2021 to $49 billion by 2026. That ascendency is going to make the quality assurance (QA) aspects of the development lifecycle faster and more effective than ever. AI integration and continuous automated testing will catch bugs earlier, reducing time to market while raising the bar for new releases.

Will this also eliminate the need for human testers? Not so fast.

5.  Demand for Testing Talent Won’t Vanish, But It Will Shift

As effective and efficient as it is, AI testers can still only perform low-skill tests. This means that while their growing popularity will reduce demand for low-skill testers, demand for more experienced QA professionals will actually increase. More complex tests will still need to be completed by humans, and QA experts will be needed for test automation development, strategy, and management. What tests need automating, what needs the human touch-humans will still have a lot to do in QA in 2024. In summary, to stay competitive in 2024, software developers will need to invest in the right emerging technology-and the right people to use it.

6.  Test Data Management (TDM) Will Become Even More Crucial

Given all of this evolution, TDM will become an even more essential best practice for development teams. In 2024, we’ll see more innovation around TDM tools that help ensure compliant data and provide more consistency to test data. TDM solutions must keep pace with software development practices in order to better support shift left testing. Expect to see more automation, more AI, and more support for multi-cloud and self-service environments.

Conclusion

This new norm we’ll build in 2024 won’t last long. Generative AI will get more robust, but so will the regulations around it. AI-powered development tools will become increasingly normal, but so will the need for human managers. It’ll be a year of productive tensions between speed and accuracy, convenience and compliance, automation, and human expertise. The most successful companies will harness those tensions to their own ends.