Software Development Trends for the Year 2022
We are heading into the year 2022, so it is time to discuss hot trends and perspectives for the whole industry. Let’s look at 2022 software development trends from 3 different perspectives: software developer’s, project manager’s and product designer’s.
Serverless is more and developers are (almost) the new DevOps
Piotr — Partner, Team Leader, Technology Evangelist:
The level of abstraction can blow our minds if we look at how backend systems are changing in the runtime environments. Serverless platforms like AWS Lambda, Azure Functions or Google Cloud Functions are making their way to software development. Conquering them might be a pretty useful skill in 2022. Vendors of serverless platforms will continue to provide us with other features and tools that will help to manage the backend by a developer. Thanks to that we can handle the backend focusing only on our code. The server is just an abstraction for us.
In my view, that is just the beginning of the abstraction that we will experience. As a result, serverless is changing the character of the DevOps job. I do not claim that we will not need DevOps anymore. Yet it is becoming a part of the developers’ duties to configure cloud services on their own. So exploring AWS or Azure solutions is a must and it will be expected from backend developers in 2022. If you are a developer and you think that AWS or Azure does not concern you, you can fall behind.
Read another blog post to find out how these changes are seen from DevOps perspective.
Saying goodbye to the project management before COVID-19
Kasia — Senior Project Management:
2022 will be the year when project managers will need to ultimately face the fact that the team working model will never go back to the way it was before the pandemic. It will be high time to analyze processes created “for now” because of the pandemic and adapt them into permanent ones.
Agile methodologies are all about communication so in the era of remote and hybrid work, project managers have to utilise management tools in the best possible way. Post-its on the wall are no longer an option. Whether you like that or not, the year 2022 will also show the power of documentation that might be a key to surviving in a team spread around the world.
Check out another blog post to learn more about how to stay Agile in a distributed team.
Make onboarding that sells the value
One of 2022 product design trends will be simplicity in-app onboarding. We talk all about simple and minimalistic design but I think that we still forget to incorporate it in the user onboarding process. Onboarding is widely used for making users familiar with the interface, new features or instructions on how to set up. Why does it matter? Because around 25 percent apps downloaded by mobile app users were only accessed once after download.
However, how often do you skip onboarding? We tend to skip it when it teaches us how to use the app. In most cases users should know how to use the app thanks to our design. So during onboarding don’t introduce every tap in the app — show the crucial features and the values that they offer. If users don’t see benefits from your solution, your app might quickly disappear from their devices. Downloading the app doesn’t mean that you succeed, you still have to show users that the solution is worthy of their attention, time and device storage…
Though in some cases we do not need the onboarding, in others onboarding is inevitable, for instance when we need to set-up an account and we cannot use our product without the account e.g. banking apps. The other case is — content personalization, when the user needs to personalize the app. Great examples are fitness, running or health apps.
But remember — do not overuse the onboarding for unnecessary information. Save your users from the information noise.
By Piotr Mionskowski (Partner, Team Leader, Technology Evangelist), Kasia Łukasiewicz (Senior Project Manager) and Alisa Kashytska (Product Designer) @ Bright Inventions.
Originally published at https://brightinventions.pl on December 2, 2021.
