By Siddhartha Agarwal
If you’re a developer, the top three things you focus on are:
2017 will only increase the pressure on developers to be faster and more efficient in how they create new applications, add features, and extend apps. The year ahead will sharpen that focus because line-of-business leaders are demanding many more applications and features, knowing most will fail but that the handful of winners will make a bigger impact on the business… With that business environment as the backdrop, here are seven predictions I’d like to offer for what developers should expect in 2017:
AI will become the new UI—it’ll be one of the elements that truly set some applications apart from the others. But, there are two aspects to AI. One is the algorithms that developers write, and the second is the data that feeds the AI apps and makes them smart. Content is still king. New companies that gather valuable and unique data, anonymize it as needed, and make it available for as many frameworks/libraries/programming languages as possible will emerge. Examples could include consumer preference and browsing trend data linked to anonymous profiles; it could be data from a human resources app, aggregated from millions of employees, that can be used to predict when valuable employees are likely to leave. These new AI data providers will have the data, but the competitive advantage will come from developers knowing which is the best data and how they can use it wisely to meet a business objective.
We’re getting tired of having multiple mobile apps for the same purpose. I fly multiple airlines, so I would like one messaging app—say, Facebook Messenger or WeChat—through which I can say « Check in, and get my boarding pass, » rather than having to download apps from a half dozen airlines. Airlines will still need those apps, but the interface to them will be through a chatbot that understands natural languages—whether it’s text like Facebook Messenger or voice like Apple’s Siri. And it can work in reverse, with the bot telling me when it’s time to check in. Developers will look for cloud platforms that can help them leverage those chatbot capabilities efficiently, such as by allowing them to write a single interface that works across multiple chat platforms.
The volume of development/test environments can be 3 to 10 times larger than production environments, due to all the staging, regression testing, performance testing, and other testing environments that customers have.
