Latest Software Development Trends 2023

9 Software development trends to look out for in 2023

The changes in software development resemble evolution rather than revolution. We can thus confidently say that IT market in 2023 will continue in the direction it had in 2022. However, different subbranches of software development will likely surprise us with new advancements. Artificial Intelligence, the Internet of Things, AR/VR/MR companies have already announced many promising releases for the year.

1. Rapidly rising popularity of low-code development

In 2023, we are at the stage where we can confidently say that custom software development is nearing complete maturity in many categories.

We have a multitude of different database systems created with specific business scenarios in mind, and they all are great. We have a wide variety of programming languages best suited to different kinds of applications, and they all are great.

What does it mean?

These days, changes in programming will boil down mostly to the optimization of existing solutions and architectures to push the boundary of software performance even further. Nevertheless, there are still some interesting advancements worth keeping an eye on.

One of the main Low-code development platforms, as industry experts project that their popularity will only continue to rise and may very be the most influential trend in software development.

According to the latest Gartner forecasts, the global low-code market is expected to reach $26.9 billion in 2023. This estimate represents an increase of nearly 20%, up 19.6% from 2022 to be exact. In other words, it vastly outpaces the overall growth of the traditional software development market.

Some software developers fear that low-code and no-code platforms may be on their way to take their jobs away. Others argue that these tools are only good for simple proof-of-concept (POC) projects.

These assumptions might have been true a couple of years ago, but times have changed, and new developments are on the horizon.

Low-code open-source platforms based on well-known programming languages like Java offer a great deal of modularity, while at the same time allowing developers to create more advanced business logic. The open nature of these solutions also eliminates the risk of vendor lock-in, thanks to allowing individual companies to retain complete data ownership.

So, in a nutshell, employing low-code solutions can greatly improve the speed of software development projects without worrying about declining code quality.

And what about your average software developer? Well, low-code platforms greatly simplify repetitive tasks that experienced programmers have done hundreds of times in their careers and allow them to focus only on the fun part of coding itself.

2. Microservices and their alternatives simplifies deployment and scaling

Microservices are an ongoing architectural trend in the software industry that you’ve all probably heard about at this point. This approach focuses on creating single-function modules with well-defined operations and interfaces.

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Recently, new cloud and container developments have greatly increased the software development companies’ interest in microservices as a go-to choice when building software architecture from scratch. The consensus among developers is that monolith architectures just lack the sheer scalability capabilities of microservices.

Considering how important scalability is to businesses, it is hardly surprising why this architecture has gained traction recently.

In a 2021 IBM survey, 88% of current microservices users said they agree that microservices architecture offers many benefits to their development teams and 87% agree or completely agree that the effort and expense of adopting this approach will be worth it.

We can easily predict that due to new enchantments the popularity of microservices, will continue to grow in 2023, but are there any alternatives on the horizon? There might be.

Monolith Software architectures might make a comeback in a form of Spring Modulith project.

It’s a modular monolith that lets software developers write code using dynamic isolated pieces. With this approach, programmers can separate testing, development, documentation, and dependencies. It basically offers monolith architecture modularity and efficiency of microservice development with little overhead involved. The Spring Modulith project isn’t based on Java platform modularization (Jigsaw). The separation is enforced during testing and in runtime, this is a normal Spring Boot project.

Will Modulith be a serious alternative to ever more popular Microservices? Only time will tell.

3. Increased focus on UX/UI

These days, it’s an absolute necessity for businesses to have an online presence.

But through the years user exceptions have changed, and simple static websites just won’t cut it.

No matter whether we are talking about a manufacturing company creating a simple landing page for their products, or a solely digital business, these days online users demand minimal loading times coupled with creative ways of presenting content on the screen.

These days the most attention is given to the mobile experience as it is expected to be as fast and reliable as on the desktop browsers. And that’s not without any reason. Smartphone users are really sensitive to loading time and generally reluctant to download unnecessary applications on their devices.

To answer these needs, many companies are turning to progressive web apps (PWAs) to find a solution to rapid mobile development.

The interest in PWAs has been steadily growing since their introduction in 2015. In one study, progressive web apps recorded a 36% higher conversion rate than their native counterpart. Being regular websites by nature, these software solutions, they don’t require their users to download anything. At the same time, they fulfill a great chunk of mobile application functionalities. Progressive web apps can thus be a great tool for businesses to improve engagement rates and user experience.

4. Big changes in the IT market

Big tech layoffs

In the past years, developers still seem to land jobs with ease.

But lately, there was not a single month when there wasn’t another big tech layoff announced. The general economic slowdown that has taken place over the past year, combined with large layoffs at major tech companies, has resulted in a somewhat less rosy job market outlook for developers.

It is estimated that over 200 thousand workers has been laid off from major tech companies like Meta, Twitter, and Amazon last year.

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Will this worrying trend continue in 2023? Well, things might not look as bleak as they seem.

The economy is beginning to slowly stabilize. Increased interest rates have greatly reduced companies’ access to cheap and easy external funding sources, but also have put inflation somewhat under control. But regardless of that, good developers will still be able to find good positions, but they may not be as abundant as in previous years. Most disadvantaged will be those who are just beginning their programming adventure.

[Read also: How to Find Software Developers? 10 Experts Tips]

Software development outsourcing remains in demand

The need for rapid digital transformation is now firmly understood by all top executives.

But how to introduce new digital solutions when the software development process is so resource-consuming and experienced developers are hard to come by?

The answer is outsourcing.

According to a recent Gartner report, 64% of executives say that it is increasingly hard to find experienced IT professionals which impact their digitalization efforts. Another research from last year has shown that up to 73% of technology leaders say it’s either very or somewhat challenging to find new talents in the IT market.

Outsourcing has proven to be a great way of extending IT departments or even developing new digitalized corporate solutions without the need for in-house development teams in the first place.

In 2021 the IT outsourcing market reached over 520 billion USD and is expected to swell to over $689 billion by 2027. What’s more, According to experts, global IT spending was increasing by 4% in recent years. 2023 promises to be equally optimistic.

What does it mean for developers, though?

Software houses and software development companies will still be reputable employers. If you want to work on various development projects using cutting-edge technology, these companies can be a great choice for you!

5. Cloud is on the rise

In recent years, cloud architectures were embraced not only by startups and commercial businesses, but even by the public sector organizations and institutions.

Healthcare organizations, legal authorities, security offices, and even the Pentagon have recognized the value of cloud computing. The trend is fueled by the fact that companies are now more confident in using cloud-native solutions for app development, team management, and communication.

These are also a much larger choice of software products as organizations can choose between services hosted in public, private, or hybrid clouds. Based on containers and microservices, cloud-native software solutions provide a great deal of flexibility and scalability and improve the productivity of software development teams.

[Read also: How to Build a Custom Accounting Software]

It’s entirely possible that by the end of 2024, there will be a significant transition of various businesses and other organizations to the cloud across the whole world and not only in highly developed economies.

It should be noted though that the demand for cloud services and tools in the past three years has grown mostly due to the necessity of facilitating remote work. But as it turns out, remote work is here to stay and cloud-based solutions can provide organizations with a multitude of advantages besides enabling work environments in home offices.

According to recent studies, more than 90% of companies representatives said that cloud computing usage is higher due to the pandemic. Even though global IT spending decreased during the lockdowns, cloud spending has actually grown by more than 6% to a total revenue of $258 billion. The cloud computing market is expected to double over the next couple of years.

6. AI and ML sets brand new boundaries

AI has been blowing up lately, both in the news and in real-life applications.

Just a couple of years ago, we’ve only been wondering how AI will influence industries like healthcare and ecommerce with stuff like advanced pattern recognition and machine learning.

Now, in 2023 the age of AI has finally come. Artificial intelligence is creating art and holding conversations with humans from all over the globe.

For developers, incorporating AI in their solutions will soon become a must-have rather than some breakthrough functionality.

Big players in the IT market have already noticed that trend.

Google has developed TensorFlow — a library for neural network development. Combined with one of many AI frameworks like Theano, it provides developers with a fast environment for building and testing neural networks and machine learning solutions.

Google as well as other search engines are also currently in a race to successfully integrate chatbot functionalities into their search engines. After the immense success of Chat GPT, other companies soon followed in OpenAI’s footsteps to create their own natural language solutions. Surprisingly, a current front-runner seems to be Microsoft with their new Bing AI assistant, as it is entering a beta testing phase.

Another of the most influential trends that have revolutionized the way we perceive AI solutions have been Stable Diffusion. It is a deep learning, text-to-image model released last year that is primarily used to generate images based on natural language descriptions. It can also be applied to other tasks such as inpainting, outpainting, and generating image-to-image translations guided by a text prompt.

In the past months apps like Dalle 2, and Craiyon have been shocking us with out-of-this-world art pieces generated based seemingly only on a basic description written by the user.

But as you might suspect, there’s another side to this coin.

Just as new AI-based applications are popping up, there are serious copyright concerns. After all, Stable Diffusion algorithms don’t “create” the content they present to the user, but fetch for different elements online and sort of mash them up together to obtain desired results.

Generative pre-trained transformer algorithms, that Chat GPT is based on, also have their own sets of problems. Sometimes the answer they give you can sound off or, in some circumstances, it can be just plainly incorrect.

You can also check it for yourself. If you have a chance, type into Bing AI assistant or ChatGPT a question from a topic that you are familiar with, like “What are the top 5 electric vehicles currently on the market?”, or “What programming language is best for writing high-performance software?”. More often than not, you will see that answers that are B- at best.

OpenAI acknowledged that and said that “sometimes Chat GPT writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers”. This behavior is actually quite common to large AI-enabled language models and is often called artificial intelligence hallucination.

How will we solve copyright issues related to AI-generated content? How can we stop Bing and ChatGPT from spreading misinformation to their users? These are the main questions regarding artificial intelligence that await answers in 2023.

One thing is for sure – AI is here, and it is only beginning to influence more and more aspects of our lives.

7. Virtual reality has got a chance to redeem itself

In 2021 VR has got a lot of attention due to the sudden rebranding of Facebook and its ambitious plans to launch Metaverse – a revolutionary VR alternative to traditional social media platforms.

Two years later, after pouring billions of dollars into its quite impressive VR headset and much less impressive virtual environment called Horizon Worlds, Metaverse, at least for now, has turned out to be a commercial flop of monumental proportions.

Even though industry leaders have hopped on the bandwagon and searched for people for positions of “Chief Metaverse Officer” the hype has quickly died down, and now this new virtual universe has fewer than 1000 daily active users.

Despite that, Mixed Reality (MR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Virtual Reality (VR) have all significant potential in many enterprise applications. Organizations in sectors like defense, tourism, architecture, construction, gaming, and healthcare, see a lot of opportunities in this technology but is just not ready at this moment.

The threshold for wide commercial use of virtual reality is somewhere out there. We have yet to reach it.

Having said that, the global market for VR and MR is growing rapidly. An IndustryARC market research report projects that this market will grow from just over 1 billion USD in 2017 to almost 10 billion in 2024, and it will see a CAGR of 73.2% during the 2018-2023 period.

What does it mean for software developers? In the coming months and years, there might be some interesting developments in the fields of gaming and programming languages related to it like C# and Java.

8. Security concerns on the rise

Another of the key software development trends is rising awareness about cybersecurity.

Industry experts point out that cybercrimes cause trillions of dollars in losses. it should come as no surprise that cybersecurity is becoming a prominent consideration when developing an enterprise-grade software application.

That’s why DevSecOps is the preferred approach of more and more companies. Development Security and operations, or DevSecOps for short, is an approach to culture, automation, and software design that integrates security as a shared responsibility throughout the entire development process.

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Today, new features and code are being pushed out very quickly, so quickly that security testing cannot keep up. That’s why DevSecOps integration is so important when implementing security without having to slow down the pace of the development or delay future releases.

The main objective of DevSecOps teams is to fix security issues in the code in real-time instead of leaving them for being dealt with at the tail end of the development process. The result is software that’s deployed as quickly and securely as possible.

The DevSecOps approach has gained a lot of popularity recently. In a 2021 GitLab survey, 70% of IT security experts said their teams have moved security earlier in the software development process. That represents almost a 7% increase year-to-year. We can predict that this trend will only grow in 2023.

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9. Use Of Blockchain in software development expands

The media cover concerning blockchain technology lately has been focused on cryptocurrencies and NFTs. But, this technology has pretty important implications for the broader software development industry as well.

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Of the key advantage of blockchain technology is its security. Blockchain-oriented software (or BOS for short) systems are robust and incredibly secure. The data in these systems is replicated and decentralized, almost completely eliminating the threat of unauthorized access.

They also provide transaction recording and public-key cryptography, which all add an extra layer of safety. Users can use the software, but they cannot modify or delete any data. There’s thus minimal risk of hacking and data leaks.

One area in which the security of blockchain technology can find its practical use in the near future is the healthcare industry.

Blockchain-based systems can create links between pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and other healthcare facilities, all while having very sensitive patient data secured.

Blockchain can also find its use in the fintech industry. They can automate financial management systems using a technology called smart contracts. Once a given condition is met, the contract is executed immediately. Because these contracts are digital and fully automated, there’s no paperwork involved, saving a lot of time in the process.

Even though NFTs have turned out to be a huge flop and didn’t live up to the hype, the blockchain market is still flourishing.

Globally, it is expected to grow at a CAGR of more than 46% through 2024. And big organizations see a lot of potential in this tech. According to Deloitte study, 55% of executives said blockchain was in their top-five strategic priorities for coming years.

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Latest software development trends – closing thoughts

Software development is a constantly evolving field. While some programming languages and frameworks can be all the rage, a few years later the same technologies can be regarded as clunky and obsolete.

To remain competitive in this highly digitalized world, business executives and software developers should always keep up with the latest trends that are shaping the future of software engineering, and integrate new technologies into their processes.

We are Stratoflow, a custom software development company. We firmly believe that software craftsmanship, collaboration and effective communication is key in delivering complex software projects. This allows us to build advanced high-performance Java applications capable of processing vast amounts of data in a short time. We also provide our clients with an option to outsource and hire Java developers to extend their teams with experienced professionals. As a result, our Java software development services contribute to our clients’ business growth. We specialize in travel software, ecommerce software, and fintech software development. In addition, we are taking low-code to a new level with our Open-Source Low-Code Platform.