As every new year rolls around, it is time to look ahead and see what software development trends we can expect to see in 2022. To help, we have studied the ‘Predictions 2022: Software Development’ Report by research firm Forrester.

Here are those 5 predictions for software development in 2022.

More Focus on Event-Driven Architecture

Forrester predicts that event-driven architecture (EDA) is going to continue its growth among developers. This kind of software promotes the production, detection and reaction to ‘events’ – such as a transaction through a website – and allows a business or organization to react to them in real time, or at least in near-real time.

Just 12% of global developers were focused on EDA in 2020, though that number jumped to 20% during 2021. The Forrester report estimates that the number will accelerate even more during 2022, reaching 35% by the end of next year.

More Support for Next Gen Web Runtimes

The next prediction sees web and mobile front ends continuing to converge, with 2022 establishing a clear difference between successfully converged mobile development environments and those being left behind.

The report states that byte code interpreters with efficient just-in-time and ahead-of-time compilers will allow code to behave across platforms with no delay in launching for streaming execution and multi-stage just-in-times.

Forrester believes that the importance of programming language will decrease while enthusiasm for next-generation and platform-independent runtimes will increase.

Consolidation of DevOps Toolchains

The report predicts 2022 will see a continuation of the shift to consolidated toolchains and pipelines, especially regarding DevOps. A lot of organizations and businesses have already shifted to consolidated test frameworks, with DevOps tools the most likely to follow suit next year.

Consolidated DevOps tools will allow developers to automate governance compliance and use value stream management tools. They should also be able to advance GitOps adoption, which is an operational framework applying DevOps best practices in application development.

Ultimately, DevOps systems will essentially become platform-as-a-service, say Forrester, enabling developers to automate development cycles.

AI Integration to Increase

AI was always going to be part of any list of software trend predictions for 2022, and Forrester believe that vendors of low-code and no-code development tools will be embedding AI in their toolsets more and more during the next twelve months. This will probably include the likes of new natural language capabilities which should make the tools easier to use.

The Forrester report also predicts an influx of production-ready and open-source GPT-3-based code solutions to hit the market next year.

More Collaborative Work Management Adoption

Businesses will be using 2022 to replace traditional software portfolio management tools with collaborative work management software, says the report. This will include more analytics and machine learning capabilities that can support predictive work planning.

Next year will see more vendors offering task-driven workspaces that support business users in work planning and execution. This will allow small businesses to combine tasks, projects and workflows, as well as the likes of content publishing, reporting and analytics.

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