There is certainly more optimism among app dev organizations than was the case a year ago.  While the shock of early 2009 has passed, they are left with the sobering reality that every investment in tools, processes and people must make a significant contribution to the bottom line.  In 2010 managers will face increasing demands without a corresponding increase in headcount, which will cause them to ask themselves in whatever they do: “How can I automate this?”  That’s not to say that developers, QA people, release managers, and the rest of the team should expect pink slips.  Instead, since the size of the team is not likely to grow, managers will be looking for ways to make the existing team more effective and focused on the most important tasks via tools and process automation.

Other predictions:

• More of your app lifecycle will move into the cloud.

While “cloud computing” for app dev seemed like an appealing, yet just out of reach idea in 2009, it will find its way into the many organizations in 2010.  This year will see increased traction of cloud computing, primarily in support of software development.  Within your organization, cloud technology means you can invest in centralized, scalable systems (private clouds) that utilize physical and virtual machine resources to maximize efficiency. Adding in resources from a public cloud, the elasticity benefits get even bigger.  You only need to pay for what you use and you're absolved of power, network, and rack space concerns. The benefits of cloud computing to the software production process will be exploited even more in the coming year. While many enterprises will not or can not move entire applications into the cloud due to security concerns, some parts of the application development process are ideal for the cloud.   Specifically, these are build and test processes, which are inherently “bursty” in their demand for compute resources.  Shops that invest in systems that can deliver the fine grained control that they get with local machines to cloud environments will enjoy the best of both worlds.

• The chasm between open source Continuous Integration (CI) tools and enterprise applications widens.

At the start of 2010, many organizations have a CI system of some sort – many of them using open source tools.  These tools will fall out of favor in enterprise development shops.  I’m not bashing open source CI tools, by any means.  There are very good ones out there.  But in our experience, they become less effective as the level of complexity in your CI process increases (whether that is complexity from number of developers committing code, variants being built, or geographic locations supported by a single system).  Again, with organizations seeking to automate as much as possible, maintaining multiple instances of open source CI servers across the organization is simply not a good use of resources.  Thus, the migration to enterprise CI solutions will accelerate in 2010.

• Continuous Testing (CT) eclipses Continuous Integration (CI) as the new new thing.

Green (good) builds are nice, but green tests are gold. As teams automate more and more of their tests, running them early and efficiently will become the overriding goal.  Basic CI will become table-stakes and teams will place a greater importance on testing, beginning at the developer’s desktop.

• Software production infrastructure becomes as important (and complex) as the software being developed

In 2010 app dev leaders will acknowledge that their software production infrastructure requires as much attention and planning as the software they write.  As software becomes more complex, so do the tools, the process, and the systems needed to support the application lifecycle. The number of moving parts in the build/test/release factory will start to rival the complexity of the applications being built.  This will strain the relationship between development and IT, and with many IT staffing levels frozen, drive the need for automated resource provisioning as well as process automation across the board.  Managing these resources, tools, and processes by hand will simply not scale.

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