Modern Software Engineering Paves the Grounds of Disruption

Quick Rundown: With over 40 million developers worldwide and a projected market value of $1.2 trillion by 2026, the modern software engineering industry is a force to be reckoned with. But what exactly is driving this disruption? In this blog, we'll explore the best practices, benefits, and transformative impact of modern software engineering, empowering you to stay at the forefront and leverage the power of modern technology.

Transformation (noun) - a significant change in appearance, nature, or form – has been happening since the origin of society itself. AI, machine learning, blockchain, big data, and other sophisticated technologies of today are just modern iterations of the stone, bronze, and iron tools our ancestors put into action thousands of years ago.

In modern software engineering, such transformations have their own price. If you want your business to grow and flourish, today's digital economy calls for some similar stakes – learn, embrace, or die.

And over the last two decades, it has become quite clear that business leaders of larger organizations succeed or fail on the capability of developing robust software, which lies at the heart of digital, agile businesses. Many big enterprises strive to abide by a strategic plan for successful software development initiatives that small-scale digitally native firms once celebrated.

Yes, we’re talking about Agile, DevOps, continuous delivery, two-pizza-sized teams, and mantras like “fixing things by failing first.”

Consequently, we have come across an existential question to decipher this riddle and address a few pressing imperatives - what is the art of modern software engineering practices? How can organizations ensure successful software deployment at a stretch? And what are the major challenges and risks associated with it?

We have curated this article for:

• Anyone willing to learn the ins and outs of modern software development
• Anyone who’s skeptical about implementing new-age practices in software projects
• Anyone interested in learning how to deliver high-quality products at reduced risks

Let's get started!

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The Ever-Changing World of IT Operations and Software Development

The increasing need for speed and agility is a common phenomenon in the business world today. The wide horizon of technological advancements has transformed the way we do business and allowed some of us to gain a competitive edge over others.

However, getting the desired speed is not easily achievable for organizations. And there are quite a few reasons for this.

The first one would be customer behavior that has changed in almost every industry over the last ten years. What consumers need today are high-value apps with continuous release and easy availability that they can access from anywhere, anytime. Most companies fail to catch up with these demands as a result of monolithic systems, technical debts, traditional approaches to software development, organizational silos, and so on.

When all these aspects come into play, the extent of risks to the business grows. Eventually, the whole initiative will be a balancing act between risk and speed while making consumers the center of the value chain.

At such a point, all we need is a holistic view of modern software engineering. The change should come from a focus on a solid end-to-end software development process.

Best Practices of Modern Software Engineering

There is a set of core values that essentially shape the imminent future of software development – transparency, automation, and democratization. These leading software development trends are cutting down the expense needed to build new products and reducing the challenges for non-technical team members to contribute to the process.

The following are some of the modern software development practices that reputed software development companies around the globe have embraced. The goal is simple – executing next-level visions and delivering high-quality products.

So, if you want to keep the market competition on your toes, ensure your team follows these methods to speed up the development life cycle.

Complete Scalability with Microservices

The microservices architecture (MSA) infrastructure is the building block of many modern network apps and a crucial prospect of modern software design. As a distributed network structure, MSA empowers you to scale horizontally with network redundancy. It consists of loosely-coupled modular components, and you can use each of these individual components to support your particular business need.

In other words, you can break your software app into multiple deployments, enabling cross-functional teams to problem-solve, create, test, deliver, and upgrade independently. For example, analytics, authentication, and payments are some of the business goals that you can achieve with the help of microservices.

The Automation Value of CI/CD

When it comes to the value of automation, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment are the radical approaches to modern software development.

CI allows developers to make verified changes to the code and implement them in the app as a whole, ensuring the code and app are working properly and reducing the risk of conflicts. On the other hand, CD enables developers to verify that the code has been reviewed and approved to launch, ensuring the new features are always ready for production.

Before the popularity of CI/CD, integrating codes and deploying them was an exhausting process. Development teams needed to join forces, arrange a particular time to integrate new features, and avoid conflicts in code upgrades between various team members. In such a crisis, CI/CD helps in connecting developers to the stakeholders and approving their changes at once. All these lead to improved trust and increased speed that will help you bring new and exciting features to the market at the earliest.

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Faster and Safer Releases with Feature Management

A critical aspect of Agile software development is determining which features are usable in production. Feature flagging is one of the crucial modern software engineering practices in this regard that provides the development team with considerable control over how and when features should be released to consumers. In return, this allows IT leaders to launch fully-approved features as per the market need.

In traditional development processes, the business and development team needed to work closely together to align technical and business goals before the product launch. But working in sync was not that easy due to different timelines, approaches, and timelines.

With feature flags, developers can deploy new features in production when they are ready, and the business team can release them to customers at their convenience as well, without depending on each other.

Driving High Efficiency with Release Orchestration

Although CI/CD pipelines come with their own benefits, sometimes they can be a bit complicated as well, such as with multiple testing and launching phases. Therefore, software engineering modern practices require you to have more than an effective CI/CD strategy.

Here arises the need for release orchestration that can bring CI-CD together and manage dependencies and release pipelines across all environments, DevOps tools, and enterprise teams. As a result, you can predictably and safely launch new products and implement changes whenever your business demands.

While CI/CD empowers you to take your app from code and make it production-ready, release orchestration lets you put it into production and ensure they provide the business value as expected. It also offers a greater level of transparency and control into complicated enterprise pipelines.

Functional Programming for Pure Functions

It's increasingly becoming apparent for organizations that well-designed, user empathetic, and higher quality programming languages are the key components for successful, user-centric product output. This realization has quite simply resolved the dilemma of Functional programming vs Object-oriented programming in modern software engineering.

Functional programming languages, such as Scala, Haskell, and Common Lisp, offer pure functions where debugging algorithms is a lot easier. Additionally, functional languages provide optimal transparency, enhance readability, allow efficient parallel programming, and store value only when required.

In a nutshell, functional programming lets developers use mathematics-like functions and values and generate well-analyzed outcomes without any outside influence. The upshot is a concise and cleaner code that makes maintenance and debugging a seamless process for everyone.

Serverless Functions-as-a-Service

The deployment of traditional server software touched a new height of advancement with the rise of cloud-hosted infrastructure. Serverless architecture revolutionized the world of hosting services by allowing us to directly upload individual code functions and execute them efficiently.

Simply put, FaaS provides a serverless platform on which you can execute the modular components of a code. This modern software development technique allows you to create a core code function that takes input and returns output, and upload it on the fly. It will then be executed in response to an event, such as a user clicking on a particular function of a software app.

Serverless FaaS makes it incredibly easy to scale code. It also streamlines the entire release pipeline, from development to production, and is also a cost-effective strategy to utilize microservices.

The Emerging Influence of Containerization

If you want to seamlessly automate developer support responsibilities like testing and system configuration, containerization is the best solution for you. This progressive technology helps in the automation of several deploying and hosting tasks, leading to the creation of powerful and scalable applications.

Before the inception of container technologies like Kubernetes or Docker, it was not possible for developers to ensure that their software app would run the same way on other machines. It was a cumbersome and risky affair to move apps around between hosting services and cloud machines.

Containerization, with its modern software engineering practices, lowered such barriers by enabling developers to package all the system dependencies into a portable container that can be executed on different machines.

Key Benefits of Modern Software Development

Today's IT leaders understand that Agile and DevOps solutions are all about a cultural shift that paves the way towards breaking age-old methods and embracing leading-edge practices. It places customers at the center of your value chain.

Modern software development does not only boost your organizational efficiency but skyrocket your customer base and audience engagement as well. Your digital product/website application creates the first impression on your users, and thus, the success of your business critically depends on the digital brand experience you deliver to your prospective clients.

If you’re still doubtful, here are a few reasons why your organization must adhere to modern development practices.

Productivity and Performance Improvement

The goal of every business owner is a workspace booming with the sounds of productivity and sky-high outcomes. Modern DevOps tools for software development can bring agility and efficiency to your existing workflows and expand them. GitHub, Apache Subversion, Beanstalk, and other version control systems help companies embrace digital transformation while their performance level increases by a whopping 33%.

A number is proof in the pudding that certainly does not lie!

Scalable Products

To leverage the latest tools and technologies, frameworks and programming languages are constantly introducing new features. With modern software engineering practices, you can build scalable software products so that you can meet your growing business needs in the long run. The code is speedily transforming into the future, and nothing is constant except change.

Imagine how Microsoft or Google deploy multiple updates in a single day. Agile-DevOps methodologies allow you to travel back to the past and find former code snippets so that you can review the whole thing and customize builds.

Enhanced Customer Engagement

Modern software development practices focus on rapid software release through speeding up the development process. Quite simply, this will enable you to keep updating the app and adding new functionalities according to the feedback and needs of end-users.

The goal is always to modernize your services and offer an immersive digital experience to your audience.

Better Team Collaboration

Your business has a vision towards which your team works together. DevOps culture and software development provide utmost transparency and cross-departmental insights that bring effective collaboration between the development and operation team. From a business standpoint, such an alliance is a top-notch software product engineering solution.

Modern software engineering practices also eliminate the nuisances and jargon that your team might have been facing while writing code and deploying software. Although you don’t necessarily get fully bug-free code, you can definitely change your new goals into reality through rigorous and disciplined testing.

Higher ROI

As mentioned above, the modern development process places customers at the forefront. Your business objective should revolve around how you can identify the existing problems of your consumers and deliver effective solutions.

If you rewrite your existing systems with current practices, designing and building new software becomes much faster. As a result, your products and services become more responsive and delightful for the target audience. You can achieve a wider reach and hook your customers into expective new releases and updates.

All these actions apparently lead to a higher ROI for enterprises and businesses.

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Final Words on Modern Software Engineering

When it comes to modern software engineering, “Give people what they want when they want" is the first mantra. Above everything, the final result matters. Modern software calls for solutions that simply don’t ‘suck.’ but address modern concerns and needs.

But actualizing visions into reality is hard and creating successful software is an art of its own. With organizations like Google and Netflix being the big leaders of the development game, the key strategy is to transform conventional approaches and embrace new practices.

You cannot expect your 2020 software to keep cutting ice after a couple of years or more.

Connect with our seasoned engineers to leverage best-in-class software engineering services. This is your opportunity to evolve your business for the better with time!