Latest Software Development Trends 2021

The software development industry has come a long way from the humble beginnings it has had. Today, many software is used among everyday things and has become a key part of how people lead their lives. This is why software development is one of the sectors employing a vast number of people. The companies also increasingly use better and trending technologies in multiple ways inside their company. This may include development, testing or even research.

Every technology company knows that software development is a competitive environment where efficiency and skills are important. It is also a very fast-paced environment where better technologies and optimizations should be incorporated in real-time. Software development also tries to do more work with as few resources as possible.

Here are some major insights into the software development industry, according to the report from the research consultancy IDC. 

•  As it stood in 2020, the revenue of the global IT industry was 4.8 trillion US dollars. 
• The above figure is expected to increase to 5 trillion US dollars in 2021. 
• While the global IT services invested an average of 5% less in terms of budget, their revenue growth is at 4.2% in 2021.

As such,we have discussed important trends in the software industry in this article. 

Software development trends in 2021

The majority of the successful techniques that have been used in the past few years will continue to be used in 2021, with new technologies catching up. However, due to the pandemic, some drastic shift in trends is also likely to occur. Most companies are trying to increase the efficiency of their tasks on hand during these unpredictable times. Following are the latest software development trends that have taken place in 2021. 

Increasing Digital Importance

The world, in general, has become increasingly dependent on the digital world for functioning in their day to day life. The global COVID-19 pandemic has had a major impact on businesses and individuals alike. Lockdowns were imposed worldwide and businesses struggled a lot to be profitable. While software development was not hit by the pandemic as hard as some other industries, project delays and cutbacks occurred even in the IT services.

Some major unexpected developments include

• Contactless services have begun to dominate the market
• Healthcare software development requests have increased around the world
• 52.25 % of businesses have focused on cloud migration
• DevOps activities have increased by about 51% to increase efficiency

Digital solutions have become a high demand and this trend is expected to last until the end of the pandemic. IT services have in themselves become popular. 

Remote Work

This is another trending development in the software industry. An increase in remote work started with the pandemic and many companies had to adjust to this new development at the beginning of 2020. At first, industries were scared about the effects of this but it has quickly become the new normal. Many companies have even adapted a favourable view of remote work culture. 

The research suggests the following developments in the area of remote work and productivity

• 59% of respondents said that they actually were more productive when they worked from home.
• 42% felt that they met deadlines easier when they worked remotely
• 64% of respondents wanted to work remotely for 3+ days a week

Companies might adopt this technique if it increases productivity.

Cloud Services Have Increased

The increase in remote work and the improvements in cloud technology has led to more companies using cloud services. This technology helps companies with minimal infrastructure to function very effectively. Large companies have developed their cloud services for better security and custom functionalities. SaaS(Software as a service) is an app development solution that takes up the largest portion of cloud service revenue. 

Following are the statistics on cloud services

• The total spending has grown by 6.3% in the cloud services sector. 
• The total revenue in 2021 is 258 billion US dollars for cloud services, which is 15 billion dollars more than the previous year.
• Almost 74% of businesses expect their cloud spending to increase.

Cloud services provide great flexibility while not compromising integrity. This software development trend is not going to be less popular anytime soon. PaaS(Platform as a service) and IaaS(Infrastructure as a service) are other areas where cloud services are heavily used. 

Increase in e-commerce SaaS

Despite global market fluctuations and economic decline, e-commerce businesses have grown significantly since the last year. There has been a huge demand for e-commerce, partially due to the pandemic. Numerous mobile application-enabled e-commerce services have come to the market as Software as a Service(SaaS). This is also another reason that this trend is expected to grow. AI software solutions are also being used in e-commerce applications, increasing their complexity.

Following are the important things to note about this

• Statista reports that online sales have now accounted for 14% of total retail sales of the world. This figure is expected to grow to 22% by 2023.
• e-commerce software has a value of 6.9 billion US dollars. But it is expected to grow at a rate of 16.3% from 2020 to 2027
• SaaS services, which have great benefits from cloud computing, are expected to increase.

The e-commerce industry has set to become completely digital as it is more profitable for businesses. Until that happens, this trend is bound to stay in the industry.

Low Code Development

The whole software development industry is moving towards simplification in what is known as a low code development environment. Low code platforms allow people with limited or no coding knowledge to develop software. This is incredibly helpful as it allows the creation of software fast and easily.

Following are the major developments in this area

• About 50% of developers were using or planning to use low code development platforms in 2021. This figure was 37% in 2020
• 80% of developers believe low code environments makes it easier to develop higher-level projects
• 70% of developers who use low code development environments develop applications twice as fast as those who develop applications traditionally.
• The global value of the low code development platform market is projected to be 46.4 billion US dollars by 2026.
• The growth rate of low code development platforms is expected to be 25% in the next 6 years.

With these, you can easily understand how low code development is gaining traction.

Python is Catching up to Javascript 

Javascript is the world’s most popular programming language at the present. and in 2020 a survey by Statista stated that 68% of all software engineers used javascript. While the top spot has been taken by javascript python is slowly catching up to it. 48% of all software engineers used Python. Python is also the favourite programming language of programmers creating apps featuring AI and ML features.

Containers and Microservices are becoming popular

This is a trending topic among the technical community in the software industry. With the rise of Kubernetes, scalability and deployment management has become easier. Kubernetes is an open-source container configuration system developed by Google. It allows for easier management of containers, which are user spaces with different authorities over system resources. Microservices is another trending subject in software development. It is an architecture that arranges loosely coupled services as applications.

Important statistics on this is as follows

• Statista found that 54% of businesses used container technology in some way or form. It was run either in production or was used in development. Some businesses also just experimented with it. 
• The global microservices market size was estimated to be 722 million US dollars in 2020. It is projected to reach 1.5 billion US dollars by 2026, growing at a rate of 12.7%

Microservices architecture in particular has gained a lot of traction. Containers have been trending for a couple of years now.

Outsourcing has Increased

This is another major trend in software development. It has been growing since the globalization of the economy. Software development has been outsourced for reasons like the unavailability of skilled developers and cost reduction. It also improves the speed and efficiency of applications and makes more developers around the world use the latest technology. 

Following are the major developments in this area 

• In 2000, outsourcing of services had a global market of 45.6 billion US dollars. It rose to 92.5 billion US dollars in 2019
• Large businesses have increased their spending on IT services from 6.3% in 2018 to 8.7% in 2019.
• Mid-size businesses also increased their outsourcing expenditure from 4.7% to 6.5%

This trend is quite a major one and has worldwide implications.

Conclusion

The area of software development has been evolving ever since it was invented. Software development systems have always changed to an easier and faster workflow. Nextbrain Technologies is a very fast-growing software development company in Toronto, Canada. The company manufactures mobile apps, web apps and ERP desktop applications for various clients. They offer end-to-end support to clients all the way from the design to the deployment phase.