Published on December 19th, 2020 | by Sunit Nandi

Which Technologies Should Your Development Team Invest In?

Running an effective development team requires almost constant evolution. New technologies and best practices emerge every year. While not every shiny new toy is worth investing in, some are essential. Knowing which ones to pursue and which to pass on can be challenging. The following are five technologies that every development team should invest in.

1) Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning

Artificial intelligence is a broad grouping of technologies that are intended to create systems that can mimic human intelligence. There have been various such technologies that have achieved limited versions of this goal. However, some advances, especially in machine learning, have helped to significantly push the envelope in recent years.

Machine learning is a subset of AI that focuses on creating systems that can learn when given inputs. ML has quickly proven its economic value at tech giants that use it to efficiently sort and organize information. Development teams should seek to understand and apply AI and ML to create new value for customers in innovative ways. AI can also be helpful for automation on the backend.

2) Process Automation

One of the best ways to improve your development results is to implement process automation. Your processes are the groups of tasks that your team completes on a regular and predictable basis. Processes are repeatable. By automating more of your processes, you can significantly reduce the amount of human effort needed to finish development cycles.

For example, you can use process automation to make releasing new versions of your software easier. Additionally, you can use automation to improve your code review practices. Even simple things can be automated. For example, you could send a message on your internal messaging tool whenever a user story is completed.

3) DevOps

DevOps is the combination of development work with IT operations. Creating a cross-functional team and set of processes to help handle software releases can shorten development life cycles and improve quality. With the right DevOps tools, you can achieve continuous delivery of updates. Additionally, DevOps can help with issue resolution and rapid response to customer needs.

Typically, DevOps includes significant automation of processes. Additionally, it can involve a variety of process improvements intended to help make tasks as easy as possible. Using highly effective tools can make a massive difference in your software delivery outcomes.

4) Cybersecurity

For a long time, cybersecurity has been treated as a necessary evil that has only been begrudgingly incorporated into software. This has led to issues such as backdoors, hard-coded passwords and other vulnerabilities. The result has been significant data loss and major legal and financial liabilities.

Development teams need to invest in improving their security measures. This will help to protect users and their data. Significantly, it will also protect the business from any data/security liabilities. It is usually easiest to implement high-quality cybersecurity when it is incorporated from the ground up. Therefore, it is worthwhile investing in this early.

5) Cross-Platform Tools

Many businesses have software that will be deployed to multiple platforms. For example, you may have a web, mobile and desktop version of your application. This can create some challenges because you need to maintain multiple codebases for the same functionality. One solution is to have all the processing handled server-side with each client being little more than a user interface.

However, another option is to invest in cross-platform tools. These allow you to develop for multiple platforms relatively easily. The interest in these is growing quickly. So, it is likely that improved tools will continue to become available. Often, the main challenge of cross-compilation is poor code optimization. Fortunately, this is improving rapidly.

Learn More

Discover more about how technologies could help your development team become more effective. There are a lot of tools that can be very impactful if you know where to look. Take some time to learn more about each of the above technologies. They could help you achieve your development goals.

Tags: development team, invest, software development, technologies

About the Author

Sunit Nandi I'm the leader of Techno FAQ. Also an engineering college student with immense interest in science and technology. Other interests include literature, coin collecting, gardening and photography. Always wish to live life like there's no tomorrow.