While the COVID-19 pandemic, the rules of software development have been rewritten. As organizations turned to new business models and digital offerings, development teams faced continued pressure to quickly deliver new digital capabilities and create more dynamic and anticipated experiences for customers than ever before.

For the most part, the developers have risen to the challenge, but those higher expectations will persist into the year to come – and likely well beyond.

So how will developers meet these growing expectations in 2022? We anticipate that software development will turn to event-driven architectures (EDAs), consolidated DevOps pipelines, and AI bots to continue to meet business needs.

Here’s a detailed look at three of our software development forecasts for 2022:

• At least a third of companies will focus on EDA in 2022. Growth in the distributed application architecture hits a wall when using only synchronous APIs for integration due to fragility and scalability limitations. Over the years, EDA has garnered more and more interest in tackling this wall through APIs, microservices, and integration. We predict that in 2022, this interest will increase, with 35% of companies focusing on EDA.

• Half of enterprise development teams will move to consolidated DevOps toolchains. As the best tools will continue to exist, more and more developers (and the companies that support them) are showing a preference for holistic toolchains. Developers prefer them for several reasons: to enable automated governance and compliance, to enable further adoption of GitOps, and to use value chain management tools. In 2022, we predict that 50% of businesses will rely on these toolchains, which will essentially become another platform as a service.

• Almost all developer tools will include an AI bot by the end of 2022. 2021 marked the dawn of a new era of development focused on using AI, with a controlled trial of GitHub Copilot, IBM AI for Code, and the AI ​​stack, and Oracle releasing a language generator. request. This follows the longer-term goal of using AI in continuous testing. In 2022, we expect to see AI bots in almost all development tools, adding natural language and other capabilities to the developer’s toolkit.

Higher expectations. New processes. New tools. 2022 appears to be the start of a new normal in software development.

Learn more about Forrester’s 2022 forecast here.

VP Research Director Chris Gardner wrote this post, and it originally appeared here.