Top trends in custom software engineering in 2024
In today’s dynamic landscape, information technology becomes ingrained into everyday business operations.
Forward-looking leaders going after business continuity must explore and incorporate ever-emerging trends. Business leaders are pushed towards shifting their strategies by steady market expansion, customer demand, and many other factors.
In this brief overview, we’ll dive into the top trends in custom software engineering in 2024 worth knowing.
Artificial intelligence
Among important custom software development trends – artificial intelligence and its rising implementation. Predictive analytics and maintenance, recommendation systems, sentiment analysis, personalization engines – advanced algorithms are transforming business operations.
- 97% of business owners are confident that ChatGPT will benefit their workflows
- 56% of surveyed entrepreneurs are leveraging artificial intelligence for optimized customer services, 51% of the respondents – to facilitate fraud detection and prevention
Artificial intelligence is implemented to improve data processing, everyday decision-making, and performance. With the right team to eliminate potential challenges – data availability, ethical concerns, and maintenance – the technology might provide a considerable advantage.
Some projects to mention talking about Abto Software’s AI expertise:
- AI based pose detection for physical rehabilitation software
- Infrastructure development for indoor tracking application
- NLP model for sustainability-focused brand research
Cloud technology
Another significant custom software development trend – cloud computing still sustains pervasive adoption. Cloud storage, virtual desktops, data backup, disaster recovery, communication, collaboration, and more – cloud services already changed how leaders are handling data management.
- The global cloud computing market size was valued $546.1 billion in 2022
- The public cloud services spending scale is said to grow by 21.7% in 2023, thus reaching $597.3 billion
Cloud computing is integrated to enhance resource allocation, flexibility, scalability, and, clearly, data security. And skipping common challenges – system downtime, performance and latency concerns, data migration – cloud-based applications might drive competitive advantage.
Successful projects worth mentioning speaking about Abto Software’s cloud expertise:
- Custom cloud-based data warehouse for business process automation
- Automated, cloud-based document generation for optimized marketing routines
Low-code and no-code platforms
Low-code and no-code development are approaches actively adopted to replace hand-coding methodologies. These provide visual interfaces, drag-and-drop functionality, pre-built components, workflow automation, rapid prototyping, cross-platform deployment, and other modern features.
By 2025, as reported by Gartner, 70% of software applications will leverage low-code and no-code platforms among other software engineering practices currently gaining momentum.
Sustainable technology
Sustainable development is an innovative approach reshaping design, software development, and deployment. Its principles and philosophies are focused around considering different factors – data center energy efficiency, carbon footprints, and others – throughout every project stage from design to disposal.
In 2023, as found by Statista, 36% of digital leaders globally stated to have already adopted green technology among other software engineering advancements 2024.
The practices typically implemented:
- Software design: intuitive design, energy-efficient algorithms, modular architecture, code optimization
- Software development & deployment: CI/CD, IaC, component containerization, serverless architecture
- Data management: data minimization, efficient retrieval, data deduplication, archiving, purging
- Third-party integrations: green partners, API efficiency, caching, batching, monitoring, optimization
Key principles worth mentioning:
- Carbon efficiency – software design and development in ways to minimize carbon footprints
- Electricity efficiency – software design and development in ways to minimize electricity consumption
- Carbon awareness – the understanding and acknowledging of the carbon emissions generated during software development and operation
- Hardware efficiency – the optimization of resources to extend hardware lifetime
- Sustainability measurement – the assessment and quantification of inflicted environmental impact
- Climate commitments – the pledges and actions to minimize environmental impact
Microservices architecture
Microservices architecture is another popularity-gaining approach where applications are broken into modules. This contrasts with traditional monolithic architecture where applications are created using single, unified units.
Microservices provide greater flexibility and scalability, decentralization, modularity, and more:
Improved flexibility
Microservices architecture might accelerate business flexibility by breaking down applications into services. Each service is created to perform specific functions and can be developed, deployed, maintained, and scaled completely independently.
This means:
- More opportunities – an organization can explore different technology and rethink separate services, thus enabling greater innovation
- Minimized disruption – a company can introduce new functionality and remove outdated services without affecting other components
Enhanced scalability
Microservices architecture might streamline business scalability by supporting individual scaling of services. This facilitates overall reliability and performance, capacity planning, disaster recovery, failover capabilities, and expansion.
Resource optimization
By developing and deploying separate services, an organization can allocate resources precisely where needed. This enables increased efficiency, decreased wastage and downtime, greater adaptivity, easier management, and smarter infrastructure utilization.
Easy Maintenance
By leveraging more manageable, individual services, a company can facilitate the maintenance of applications. This enables issue isolation, simplified updates and patches, more function-focused software development, and, naturally, independent deployment.
Cybersecurity prioritization
Moving further into the 21st century, more and more organizations begin admitting cybersecurity importance. Data breaches, malware, phishing, insider threats, identity theft, zero-day exploits, man-in-the-middle attacks – security threats are not only frequent but sophisticated, challenging standard cybersecurity paradigms.
The statistics are trimming – an organization is losing $1.3 million in an average breach, as stated by Forbes.
Security trends gaining momentum:
- Artificial intelligence: behavioral analysis, endpoint protection, traffic analysis, deception technologies, predictive analytics and maintenance, fraud detection and prevention, and more
- Computer vision: image recognition, image classification, metadata extraction, video processing, biometric authentication, facial and gesture recognition, object tracking, quality control, and more
- Quantum computing: data encryption, secured protocols, advanced hashing, anomaly detection, quantum simulations, post-quantum cryptography
- Zero Trust: continuous verification, threat detection and response, device compliance, dynamic policies, network monitoring, comprehensive logging and monitoring
Abto Software’s security projects:
- EHS platform for straightforward compliance reporting
- Healthcare platform for child abuse tracking
- Fall detection for real-time accident recognition
- Activity recognition for real-time driver monitoring
Internet of Things integration
Internet of Things (IoT) is a network linking physical devices, vehicles, appliances, and other embedded objects. The technology is integrated to facilitate seamless connectivity between those mentioned devices and objects to automate everyday processes.
Talking about this trend, we had to mention smart homes and cities:
Smart homes
Smart homes are modern residential environments where various interconnected devices improve households. These devices – smart thermostats, security cameras, entertainment systems, lightning, speakers, and others – are integrated to provide greater convenience by allowing responsive management.
The trends now driving the market:
- Advanced security to distinguish between residents, regular visitors, and intruders
- Sustainable living by integrating smart thermostats, energy-efficient appliances, and more
- Voice control – Google Assistant, Amazon Alexa, Apple HomeKit, Samsung SmartThings
- Health monitoring by integrating smart beds, smart appliances, and sensors
Smart cities
Smart cities are modern-day urban environments where devices enhance everyday infrastructure efficiency. These devices are facilitating energy and waste management, public safety, transportation, communication, and other critical aspects.
The trends currently receiving much attention:
- Smart mobility – innovative technology to improve the efficiency and sustainability of transportation
- Green planning – holistic approaches to enhance the resilience and sustainability of environments
- Low-power sensors, for example street and traffic lights that operate with minimal energy utilization
- Digital citizens to create more inclusive and participatory, human-centric environments
Internet of Behavior integration
Internet of Behavior (IoB) is a concept involving data collection and analysis from different connected devices. The technology is implemented to understand human behavior by analyzing their interactions and preferences to empower data-driven decision-making.
Talking about this trend, we’d like to discuss hyper-personalized experiences and so-called “quantified self”:
Hyper-personalized experiences
Hyper-personalized experiences are highly customized interactions that meet specific preferences and needs. These experiences are integrated for accelerated user satisfaction, engagement, independence, and loyalty.
Quantified self
“Quantified self” is the modern practice of using advanced technology to track and analyze individual metrics. These include physical activity, sleep patterns, heart rate, calorie intake, and related biometric information taken using wearable devices.
How we can help
In the innovation era, customer demand is an ever-evolving phenomenon to consider before investing.
Today’s custom software engineering is no longer expected and limited to delivering bespoke capabilities. Increased efficiency and performance, flexibility, scalability, data-driven decision-making, greater security – modern-day custom software solutions must deliver additional value.
Abto Software is your strategic partner to discover and incorporate the trends transforming technology. Discovery phase, requirement documentation, design, engineering, quality assurance, product deployment – our engineers can cover every stage.
Abto Software, Microsoft Gold Certified Partner with clients among large Fortune Global 200 corporations, helps leaders to embrace emerging technologies in custom software development.
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- .NET development
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