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Organizations Prioritize the Developer Experience and More in 2023

By Olivier Gaudin, CEO, Sonar

While enterprises across all industries have long understood that software is critical to running their businesses, they've only recently begun to recognize that source code is software's most essential component. Source code dictates how the software will behave and perform and, as such, must receive good care. As companies rethink the role of code in their organization, they are embarking on new ways to maximize the quality of code and help the developers who write and maintain it.

In 2023, these key trends will significantly impact software development.

Developer productivity becomes a KPI for CIOs: Organizations have begun recognizing that source code is a key strategic asset. As economic uncertainty grows, code will only become a more critical business differentiator. At the same time, enterprises will have to do more with the same or fewer resources as budgets continue to tighten. Delivering better code at an increased velocity is a simple way for companies to improve revenue without increasing spending. As a result, CIOs will begin focusing on developer productivity as a KPI to ensure that quality code maximizes business results.

Enterprises transform the developer experience: Developer burnout is a major problem that causes enterprises to lose many talented programmers. As we head into 2023, companies address this challenge by improving the developer experience. This includes a variety of different tools and initiatives. Overall, enterprises are increasingly leveraging technology and methods to improve coding efficiency, eliminating cumbersome rework and many mind-numbing manual programming tasks. These efforts liberate developers so they can focus on continuing their professional growth and doing what they love the most - delivering innovative software through well-written, clean code. Organizations will benefit from reduced employee turnover and increased business gains with developers free to focus on higher value projects.

Organizations recognize that code security lapses are not actually security issues: When it comes to code security, most developers think of traditional threats like malware, phishing, and SQL injection. Enterprises have rightly invested significant money and resources in combating those threats. However, organizations are starting to realize that most code security breaches are not caused by explicitly malicious behavior (i.e., backdoor attempts). They're caused by coding mistakes that result in vulnerabilities. In 2023, developers will change how they approach security, realizing that it's mainly an issue of code quality - and when that's addressed, there will be fewer security issues. To avoid vulnerabilities and potentially catastrophic breaches, developers will adopt new methods that make it easier to write clean code.

Software hits a fork in the road: Good software must have the ability to evolve and change - even radically when necessary - to meet shifting business and customer demands. Visual Studio Code is an excellent example of this.  Over time this software has evolved to include rich editing capabilities, including intelligent auto code completion and customization of fonts, layouts, and colors, and is now expanding its use in a cloud-based environment. Next year, we'll see software start to diverge into two categories: Software that can easily incorporate new functionality, and software that can't. The latter will prove to have limited business value and will eventually fall out of favor entirely with executives that expect software to be dynamic enough to accommodate emerging use cases.

These trends are all born from the fact that clean, quality code is becoming more important in a digital-driven world. Going forward, organizations will continue to adopt new strategies to ensure developer retention, improve developer efficiency and optimize source code in ways that enable them to achieve their business goals.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Olivier is CEO and co-founder of Sonar, whose technology enables developers and development teams to write clean code and remediate existing code organically. Olivier started his career in London, working on trading systems in the banking industry.