A year ago, Forrester predicted that citizen development would dominate, enterprise leaders would adopt API strategies, metaverse standards would remain a mess, adoption of value stream management would continue apace, and WebAssembly would take off at the edge. These predictions were largely correct, but there were some things that we did not predict.
Like everything else in technology, the developers’ world was turned upside down by AI in 2023. Open source projects became “ajar source” projects – meaning they are partially open. Spotify’s Backstage developer portal grew dramatically in popularity. Previously undervalued initiatives such as developer experience received criticism, and Google DORA metrics became the baseline for DevOps.
With all this in mind, Forrester predicts for 2024 massive changes in how developers write and adopt code. In particular, Forrester predicts the following:
- TuringBots will improve software development lifecycle productivity by 15% to 20%. By 2023, we predicted that 10% of worldwide code will be generated by AI-enhanced software development tools. We were far too cautious. 2023 proved that generative AI (genAI) has an exponential impact on software development. By 2024, many development teams will move from experimentation to integrating TuringBots into their software development lifecycle. Coders will achieve 20-50% productivity on average – some have seen productivity increase to 200% and more when experienced engineers use genAI to work with languages or libraries outside of their normal development zone. Testers will also gain 15-20% productivity, and all members of product teams will gain over 10% efficiency from their assisting TuringBots in planning and delivery. GenAI will make low code and high coding much more productive everywhere, and this will grow exponentially going forward.
- More enterprise projects will be released under open source than open source. Partially open source on squeeze has taken over. For example, Meta released a version of Llama 2 under an “open source” license, which prohibits its use when there are more than 700,000 monthly users. Red Hat, while following its obligations under the GNU General Public License (GPL), has stopped releasing its corporate changes to the public. We expect that this will open the floodgates for further software licensing tricks, where companies call their license open source when in reality it is not – it is in a pinch. Architects using open source will see many more custom licenses that call themselves open source but have conditions that require legal approval, and more companies will threaten to drop customers who request the source they are entitled to .
- Backstage will be the predominant framework for self-service developer portals. Backstage is a developer portal created by Spotify and donated to CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation). Its purpose is to consolidate the discovery, creation, and management of developer resources such as Git repos, build pipelines, APIs, and infrastructure automations into a single portal that all developers use as a service. The number of companies investing in a Backstage implementation is astounding; based on forks listed in GitHub, they include Mercedes-Benz, American Airlines, Ericsson and Lowe’s. By 2024, we expect Backstage adoption to expand and become the number one choice for IT infrastructure and operations teams to automate, abstract and expose infrastructure capabilities in the form of a developer portal. We also expect this to begin to catch on with internal API portal vendors as IT shops and the developers within seek a one-stop portal for all their internal development needs.
For more insight, please visit Predictions 2024 hub and fetch the guide. To learn more, register to attend the NA Webinar here.
This blog post was written by VP, Director of Research Chris Gardner and originally appeared here.
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