Wrap up of the Last 12 Months in Software Development

By Halyna Semenova, Engagement Director at SoftServe.

‘Home Alone’ movie-marathon? Check. Sharing presents? Check. Making a wish at the stroke of midnight? Check. Now it’s high time to get back to business and draw a line under the Software Development trends prevailing in 2014. Here are SoftServe’s findingson key priorities in the hottest software development fields.

Outsourcing a a Strategic Business Model

Less and less companies handle all of their software development in-house. With global economy continuing to improve and organisations forecasting growth, outsourcing rigidly remains a part of a strategic business model. Eastern Europe remains strongly supported as offshore partners are gaining on India as the favoured destination; Latin America continues a downward trend in its support; while Southeast Asia and China offshoring gains a little support. No wonder third-party business relationships keep growing since interest in reducing costs is still highly valued as applications and technology cycles mature.

SaaS/Cloud Going Big

Today a level of maturity in SaaS/Cloud apps creation as opposed to the previous years is higher; and the majority of companies surveyed claim they are in a post-definition stage of their SaaS/Cloud developments. This fact combined with the vast data volumes and developing intelligent applications fuel the need and opportunity for greater advances in data science and advanced analytics. An increasing number of companies are working on defining their data analytics and data science strategy.

Growing Need in Security Measures

While there have been many advances in network, application, and service security, security threats and breaches remain a top concern. Enterprises and service providers of all kind face real threats from those seeking to do harm for spite, profit, or sport. Most respondents indicated an interest and need for third-party assistance to load test security solutions, validate security measures, and develop sophisticated security to protect their data. Not surprisingly, the top response was “security measures are being applied to existing applications with customer experience being a top priority”.

Keen Interest in Mobile UX

As mobility has already become a key direction of software development, companies are putting less effort into defining mobility strategies and are actively engaging in developing and implementing innovative mobile applications. With the confluence of physical and digital dimensions, many companies find Mobile UX, Solution Architecture and Connection to legacy Enterprise systems the most challenging elements of mobile solutions development. Mobile UX rose as a recognised challenge.

Conclusions

Key findings in SoftServe’s report promise that 2015 will witness rocketing escalation of data science and SaaS/Cloud developments, growing need in security measures, improvement of mobile user experience, as well as prevailing of third party interaction. Read more in the full version of the 2014 Software Development Trends report.