Blog | Top 3 Software Development Trends for 2016

Written by iTMethods | Apr 29, 2016 10:00:25 AM

More and more, businesses are being run on software – giving them the ability to launch services quickly on a global scale.

In the words of Marc Andreessen, “software is eating the world.” For today’s forward-looking organizations, staying competitive means staying agile. That means having the right tools to maximize productivity and effectiveness.

Atlassian develops products and tools to help streamline and speed up software development, collaboration, project management, and code quality. It recently surveyed over 1,300 customers, turning its findings into an interactive map and discussing them in a blog. We’ve highlighted their discoveries for you:

1. Top Development Teams are using Git, Agile, and Continuous Delivery

Results from Atlassian’s survey show that:

80% of respondents practice agile development. Atlassian’s Agile Coach makes it easier for developers and teams to make software better, providing the tools to let teams collaborate and change their products based on feedback from the market and their customers.
85% of those surveyed use a Distributed Version Control System (DVCS) like Git, which supports branch-and-merge workflows and takes the pain out of collaborating on code.
65% of respondents practice Continuous Development (CD). CD makes shipping code a no-drama event, encouraging smaller, more frequent, and less risky releases.

When used together, these tools and practices boost teams’ productivity – letting them develop and implement code faster.

2. Development Teams are More Distributed Than Ever

Of those surveyed, 72% said that at least part of their teams worked remotely – regardless of industry.

What makes this remote, virtual collaboration and productivity possible?

A DCVS like Git allows team members to work together anywhere, anytime. Each developer has their own local repository replete with a full history of commits, can inspect previous versions, and perform diffs between commits.

Distributed development also boosts reliability. With each developer working individually, changes – particularly missteps – are isolated. Changes are peer reviewed and tested locally before being pushed to the shared repository.

Distributed teams need to have reliable collaboration tools (like HipChat). Most issue trackers will let teammates comment on issues and have in-context discussions about code changes or broken builds.

Integrated tools automate and sync content. 82% of respondents said their source code management tool was integrated with a build system, issue tracker, or both.

Consider, for example, JIRA Software, Bitbucket, and Hipchat. First, a developer creates a pull request in Bitbucket. The corresponding issue than automatically advances in JIRA, letting anyone on the team see what state the work is in. Adding HipChat to the equation gives team members access to real-time notifications on pull requests, build statuses, and other issue updates.

3. Teams are Getting Faster and Leaner

80% of respondents said their average development team had 10 or fewer members. 56% went on to report the use of containers, which help spin up staging, test, and production environments. A container allows you to define everything you need to run an application. You can use that blueprint to make new copies whenever you need to scale or share it with others. This makes development more efficient and reduces IT overhead.

What Is Your Team Doing?

In aggregate, data is useful and good. But what you really need to know is how your team is stacking up against its peers.

Check out Atlassian’s interactive comparison tool, which will show you how your team compares to others in your industry.

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