DEVOPSdigest

Industry experts offer thoughtful, insightful, and often controversial predictions on how DevOps and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2023. Part 4 covers development tools and agile development.

Start with: 2023 DevOps Predictions - Part 1

Start with: 2023 DevOps Predictions - Part 2

Start with: 2023 DevOps Predictions - Part 3

TECHNOLOGY-AGNOSTIC APPROACH

As organizations are at different stages of their digital transformation and they experience different trajectories of adopting the principles of DevOps, their toolkit must be adaptable as we head into 2023. We hear from CTOs that although they want to standardize their processes, they don't want to get locked into a specific technology stack. In the coming year, we believe organizations will adopt tools that take a technology-agnostic approach. This will help enterprises ensure a consistent, reliable, and safe process of operationalizing their software, so they can be supported as the world moves from machines to containers and serverless.
Paul Stovell
CEO, Octopus Deploy

TECHNOLOGY CONSOLIDATION ACROSS THE BOARD

Organizations will look for consolidation across the board — from architecture tools to collaboration apps — to reduce spend, improve productivity, and closely examine and prioritize the "must haves" of the organization. This will also result in a decrease in tech stack investment.
Lior Koriat
CEO, Quali

COST-EFFICIENCY BAKED INTO TOOLS

2023 will be the year cost efficiency is officially built into the tools of today's modern tech stack. In light of today's market volatility and spikes in inflation, more companies are re-evaluating their technology stack. Increasingly, we will start to see more vendors bake cost efficiency into their solutions as a way to offer a competitive advantage. This shift will drive more vendors to ensure their offerings optimize costs for customers while enabling increased productivity. For example, more organizations today are moving away from having multiple database technologies that provide for different functionalities of the business and instead are considering one single database that is efficient, able to scale and be used across the organization. Database providers that support a variety of verticals and use cases and lower the cost of doing business will see heightened demand.
Technology has the ability to impact business cost optimization and for vendors today, adaptability is key — especially in this changing business environment. Technology providers who can understand sudden market shifts and continue to provide innovative, yet cost-saving solutions will come out on top.
Ravi Mayuram
CTO, Couchbase

THE NEED FOR SBOM

Developers are putting a lot of effort into producing software builds of materials (SBOMs) to secure the supply chain, but that's only the start. If you ship a product — and a product is anything from an e-commerce website to a standalone enterprise application to a small set of tools that's only used internally — that product probably depends on well over a thousand libraries and other components. If you have built an SBOM, congratulations: now you know exactly what's in the software you ship. What do you do with that information? That's the hard part. Each of those dependencies is on its own update schedule. Some of those updates will contain fixes to vulnerabilities. But that means you have to track all these sources, incorporate them into your product as necessary, and get your customers to install your updates. SBOMs are great, but they're only the start. What developers do with this information is what's important.”
Mike Loukides
VP of Emerging Tech Content, O'Reilly Media

REAL-TIME VISIBILITY

With the development cycle getting shorter, it is important to get real-time visibility of the progress and insights on multiple tracks in parallel to deliver the right software at the right time. DevOps monitoring tools often give accurate insights only if business analysts, developers, testers etc., are vigilant enough to update progress on their stories/tasks/test cases/defects. A system or tool that can give insights into each item's progress and provide a holistic view of progress in real-time has become necessary for new-age scrum masters and project managers. Daily and weekly statuses will shift to instant real-time insights. Infusion of AI to learn more about the characteristics of the team and proactive recommendations and necessary measures to be taken to stick to the timeline will be bliss for the project sponsors.
Manan Thakkar
Director, Consulting, Synoptek

SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT BY BOTS

We've become accustomed to text predictions in our digital communication, but people may be surprised to learn that these capabilities also exist in software development. Some environments have bots suggesting how to finish code, which will become increasingly common in the years ahead. By 2028, more than half of the world's software code will be written by bots as opposed to people.
Dan Krantz
CIO, Keysight Technologies

BPM AND DEVOPS

Business teams need faster and faster responsiveness as everyone continues to look for ways to maximize go to market, and DevOps teams are always working to up their game. We've seen them leverage "shadow IT" for specialization, microservices for resilience, and containerization for delivery. I expect that business process automation solutions, like BPM platforms, will take inspiration from these examples to provide new technology options to DevOps teams. For example, the "autonomous applications" approach is already beginning to look at BPM automation platform technology differently, as a collection of small, independent and loosely coupled services instead of a collection of apps dependent on a shared set of platform resources.
Charles Souillard
CEO and Co-Founder, Bonitasoft

DEVOPS AND DEVELOPERS MIGRATE TO OPEN SOURCE

Technology budgets likely come under the microscope in 2023, I think we'll see a big increase in DevOps and developer teams migrating to 100% open source technologies that offer the same level of capabilities as open core (or proprietary) alternatives — but without the price tag.
Ben Slater
Chief Product Officer, Instaclustr

Involvement with open source community will increase, or the wrath of protestware will mount

This past year, we've seen a steady rise in protestware and deliberate sabotage by developers on their software libraries. Though several factors are at play, we cannot ignore the loudest in the room: developer frustration. Enterprise organizations take advantage of the open source community, continuously building their software and offerings upon the efforts of volunteers they don't interact with and aren't willing to support. Developer resentment will only grow further unless organizations get involved in the community to support these open-source contributors. Rewriting and improving the relationship dynamic between businesses and developers will help correct the rise in protestware. We'll need to see enterprises step up and provide developers with the necessary support and resources instead of taking advantage of their work.
Peter Wang
CEO and Co-Founder, Anaconda

OPEN STANDARDS AND FRAMEWORKS

Developers who create apps through platforms that don't offer easy portability will have little recourse if those platforms decide to increase prices or make other significant changes. Vendor lock-in is unacceptable for companies that must carefully plan their budgets. As a result, in 2023, expect a strong focus on ensuring that edge web apps rely on open standards and frameworks. This focus will increase interest in technologies not tied to a specific provider. Building apps using these technologies allows developers to shift from platform to platform as needed to optimize cost and performance.
Rafael Umann
CEO, Azion

EVERYTHING-AS-CODE

Everything-as-code will dominate the space. As infrastructure-as-code becomes a successful default, and the philosophy proliferates into other spaces (policy as code, configuration as code, supply-chain as code (SBOM) , Customer Success as Code, etc.), generating all of this new code will be delegated more and more to non-(classic) developers with the help of no-code / low-code interfaces.
Or Weis
CEO & Co-Founder, Permit.io

ROLE OF AGILE COACH EVOLVES

The role of the Agile Coach or Scrum Master will evolve as organizations move away from traditional hierarchical management models to network, skill, and community-based approaches. This will cause churn and confusion in large development organizations as career paths, support systems, and traditional HR practices will NOT keep up with the change.
Dave West
CEO, Scrum.org

TALENT SHORTAGES IMPACT AGILE DEVELOPMENT OPERATIONS

As organizations are tested with team shortages and an increased need for faster software cycles, teams will need to embrace transparent communication. 2023 may be the year of DevOps and security talent shortages, affecting the core value of agile development operations. Teams will need to refine their cross-collaboration best practices and re-evaluate how to maximize productivity and efficiency within their organizations.
Jay Paz
Senior Director of Delivery, Cobalt

AGILE ORGANIZATIONS LAUNCH APPRENTICESHIP PROGRAMS

As an antidote to the Great Resignation, agile organizations will develop apprenticeship style programs for knowledge workers in order to enable and catalyze the people and teams that they need for the present and future of their businesses. Within those programs, in addition to subject matter expertise and a rigorous focus on value delivery, developing interpersonal skills around facilitation, mentoring, teaching and coaching within agile teams themselves will be critical to their success, health and sustenance.
Patricia Kong
Product Owner Enterprise Solutions and Learning Enablement, Scrum.org

INTEGRATION OF FLOW, LEAN UX AND DESIGN THINKING INTO AGILE DEVELOPMENT

We will continue to see the integration of the ideas of Flow, Lean UX, and Design Thinking into Agile Development as teams wrestle with delivering more value in an ever-increasingly complex world.
Dave West
CEO, Scrum.org

OUTCOME-BASED OKR

The measure of velocity and constructs like Story Points will be replaced by flow metrics and single sizing, with organizations continuing to push to outcome-based OKRs to monitor delivery value and drive improvements.
Dave West
CEO, Scrum.org

AGILE PUSHBACK

Agile's success at the team level will continue to grow in 2023. However, I believe there will be some pushback from organizations against the formality of agile at scale methodologies. Some companies will be more interested in adopting smaller, lightweight "Agile From First Principles" processes that still meet their core agile needs. Enterprises wishing to be more agile must take a step back and consider how they will implement it specifically for their unique organization. Also, on the human side, they will need to consider getting their teams and employees to adopt agile frameworks regardless of their divisions, KPIs, or current workflows. Bringing agile principles to wider adoption throughout the business will see terms like RevOps, DocOps, and PeopleOps become more common.
Jon Mort
CTO, Adaptavist

"FAKE" AGILE: BEWARE OF THE SORCERER'S APPRENTICE

Agile in 2023 can't just be a state of mind — organizations will be under increased ppressure to ensure better business outcomes given economic instability. Most teams don't intentionally "fake" agile -- like the sorcerer's apprentice, they may know the incantations and ceremonies but don't fully understand what or why they are doing — so unexpected results can follow. In the coming year, we'll see more business leaders rely on teams that speak more to the language of agile (e.g. scrum teams, product owners) and its processes (e.g. sprints, Kanban Boards) rather than improving customer value and experience through early feedback and adapting iteratively.
Wing To
VP of Engineering for Value Stream Delivery Platform & DevOps, Digital.ai

Go to: 2023 DevOps Predictions - Part 5, covering containers and microservices.