As the Smart Nation push continues to position Singapore as a compelling innovation-led market for businesses and high-tech talent, the demand for software and the role of the developer based in the Southeast Asia region will evolve over the next few years.
GitLab’s 2020 Global DevSecOps Survey found that developers are already reporting new responsibilities – such as tasks normally associated with ops and security – while at the same time releasing software much faster and embracing new technologies including Kubernetes, microservices, and even artificial intelligence (AI).
The adoption of Agile and DevOps processes and practices across the software development life cycle are still somewhat immature. Enterprise leaders in ASEAN are focused on ways to provide faster releases and fixes and create innovative customer experiences.
To achieve the acceleration, they need to address the various dimensions of the changing developer role to stay ahead of the competition.
A new org chart
Goodbye, IT department and hello line of business. As the software stakes get higher and product managers continue to set software development goals, it makes sense that developers will end up embedded on business teams rather than technology teams.
A report from Forrester Research looking at trends for 2020 refers to this shift as the “dev diaspora” and predicts that after some bumps in the road it will improve productivity and release speed. The basic message: Software is critical to business success so should be located with the business rather than in the IT department.
New colleagues and culture
With developers moving “into the business” and a growing emphasis on citizen devs, it’s clear not all teams will be filled with hardcore coders. Some certainly will be working alongside citizen developers. But others may also find “team members” in unexpected places, like their integrated development environments (IDE).
Also Read: PoC to prototype to MVP: Software development 101 for early-stage tech startups
Although AI is still nascent in most enterprise development teams, some industry analysts are bullish that AI can bring speed, advice, structure, and perhaps even coding to the table in three to five years from now.
However, no matter how quickly AI ends up as part of the pro-developer work experience, it’s clear dev culture is going to have to change if “development” is no longer such a specialised skill.
To achieve a successful transformation, leaders need to figure out how to improve collaboration across different teams and encourage rapid, continuous learning and improvement, especially from their mistakes.
Yet another shift left
Security, test, and automation may have already shifted left, so now, organisations need to get ready for customers to shift left. Traditionally, developers have been largely absent from customer interactions, but that’s going to change moving forward. Developers need to be taking on a design mindset, thinking about the customer and building features together with the customer they are connecting with them as humans.
The humble growth curve
From 5G to edge computing, micro services and more, cutting-edge technologies will be mainstream soon. Developers will need to understand how to tie them neatly together. The fast-growing Internet of Things (IoT) market – predicted to offer US$31.7 billion in opportunities for Communication Service Providers in Asia-Pacific by 2025, according to Frost & Sullivan – means edge computing may be coming to DevOps teams sooner than anticipated.
Edge computing will challenge developers to literally put processing power within the application (on the “edge,” in other words) rather than having to reach out to the cloud for computations. Despite the immense hype, a 5G wireless network rollout is underway in Southeast Asia. Singapore is expected to start commercial 5G from January 2021, with two 5G licenses being issued to StarHub and SingTel.
With the aim of 5G coverage of at least half of Singapore by end 2022, 5G has the potential to upend mobile application use as we know it, and thus mobile application development.
Dramatically faster download and upload times will give developers the chance to create more-feature-rich applications with better user experiences including potentially both augmented and virtual reality.
Also Read: The open source business model: can ‘free’ be ‘profitable’?
Micro services go mainstream
The GitLab survey found that only 26 per cent of respondents fully use them but they are key to the future. Distributed systems will have a greater need for tracing and troubleshooting services and as such, the interactions between services are going to be especially important.
Developers will need to know how to manage micro services in the near future. AI has often been dismissed as a promising technology breakthrough that somehow remains out of reach, particularly when it comes to software development.
However, the 2020 Global DevSecOps Survey found that close to one-quarter of developers surveyed said that an understanding of AI/ML will be the most important skill for their future careers. And roughly 16 per cent of testers said their teams are using bots right now or have an AI/ML tool in place for testing.
It’s certainly an exciting time for DevOps and developers across Southeast Asia, as organisations look to harness the opportunities from the market’s unique position to lead the region in innovation. By understanding how the role of the developer is changing and the tech coming their way, organisations can undertake the necessary process and culture shift to enable changes in the developer thought process.
–
Editor’s note: e27 aims to foster thought leadership by publishing contributions from the community. Become a thought leader in the community and share your opinions or ideas and earn a byline by submitting a post.
Join our e27 Telegram group, or like the e27 Facebook page
Image credit: hitesh choudhary from Pexels
The post What developers need to know about tomorrow’s tech today appeared first on e27.