Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2026. Read them in this 18th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Shannon Mason, Chief Strategy Officer, Tempo Software
The speed of software development has never been faster – or more chaotic – than it is today. Development teams are constantly navigating new tools and technologies, shifting priorities driven by competition, and rising expectations from both leadership and customers. All the while, they’re expected to deliver more, deliver faster, and somehow stay on track. It’s no surprise this has created an increasingly complex and often frustrating environment for teams.
Yet even amid this pressure, a shift is underway. Development teams are beginning to recognize the opportunities hidden inside the chaos. In 2026, they’ll start reshaping the assumptions, systems, and practices that have contributed to the challenges they’ve faced.
Development teams will break the cycle of unnecessary complexity
In 2026, software teams will begin challenging the rising complexity of their own development environments, shifting from simply executing work to questioning why that work exists in the first place. After years of accumulating tools, rituals, and dependencies, developers will increasingly pause to ask whether a feature, deadline, or workflow actually warrants the effort.
Strategic portfolio management (SPM) – born from the chaos of large, interdependent software portfolios – will evolve into a practical way for engineering organizations to reconnect strategic intent with the reality of shipping code.
Instead of massive transformations, teams will adopt SPM practices in targeted, incremental ways that help them see capacity, surface bottlenecks, and make smarter tradeoffs. The software teams that get ahead will be the ones that empower developers to influence not just how code gets delivered, but which work deserves to be built at all.
The next big Shift in software isn’t delivery, it’s planning
Software organizations are about to confront the uncomfortable truth that their planning practices have fallen dangerously behind their development velocity.
For years, we’ve reinvented how we build – Agile, DevOps, cloud-native architectures, and now GenAI copilots – yet we still plan in rigid six-week cycles that are outdated by mid-week. With more than 40,000 new software projects launched every day, static planning has become a structural risk rather than an operational nuisance.
In 2026, the software companies that pull ahead will treat planning as a living system, continuously refreshed by real-time signals from engineering, product, and customer feedback loops. Instead of forcing teams to work around stale plans, leaders will empower teams to reshape priorities as dependencies shift and capacity changes.
This long-overdue shift to adaptive planning will emerge as one of the most important drivers of software innovation – and the clearest marker separating resilient organizations from the ones struggling to keep up.
AI will make flow state a feature, not a fluke, for developers
In the next few years, AI will fundamentally reshape the software development process not by replacing engineers, but by elevating their time toward the highest-value cognitive work. As AI takes on more of the tedious, repetitive, and context-switch-heavy tasks, developers will reach flow states more reliably and spend more of their day solving the problems that actually require human judgment.
Rather than maximizing �utilization,’ organizations will start measuring the quality of decision-making and the velocity of meaningful outcomes – metrics that improve as AI absorbs low-value work.
AI-driven insights will also bring a new level of fidelity to planning, helping teams project effort, risk, and capacity with far greater accuracy than human intuition allows. This shift will finally close the gap between optimistic plans and achievable delivery, enabling teams to make smarter tradeoffs earlier.
The companies that benefit most won’t be the ones who automate the most tasks, but the ones who redesign their development systems to amplify human creativity, focus, and strategic clarity.
The challenges facing software teams today are real, but so is the opportunity to rebuild the way work gets done. In 2026, the teams that question the complexities within their environment, embrace adaptive planning, and use AI to unlock flow will redefine what productivity and alignment look like. And ultimately, they’ll be able to deliver better software and applications faster, with greater clarity and efficiency – closing the gap between the chaos they face today and the outcomes they strive for.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shannon Mason, Chief Strategy Officer
Shannon Mason is the Chief Strategy Officer at Tempo Software, where she leads cross-functional strategy and long-term product direction across Tempo’s portfolio of Jira-native planning solutions. With over a decade of experience in enterprise software, Shannon is known for aligning product innovation with customer outcomes – especially in high-growth, high-change environments.
Before joining Tempo, Shannon held senior roles at Digital.ai, GitLab, and CA Technologies. Her experience spans product management, solution architecture, and strategic operations – helping some of the world’s largest organizations adopt agile and DevOps practices at scale. She’s passionate about connecting organizational psychology in vision to execution, and enabling teams to move with clarity and purpose, and she regularly shares insights on agile transformation, product leadership, and strategic portfolio management.
