The return of the whiteboard—and four other trends shaping the software developer experience in 2024
Let’s start with the elephant in the room: AI.
Yes, generative AI is changing how software developers work. No, it hasn’t brought the dramatic upheaval that some claim—not yet, anyway.
In the year ahead, AI will keep improving as a digital sidekick and productivity booster, augmenting rather than replacing people as it takes over grunt work. But it’s the early days. When it comes to business value, think of AI like VR headsets. There’s a novelty element and lots of excitement, but it hasn’t been truly integrated into workflows.
When it comes to the developer experience, however, there’s more to talk about than AI. For software developers, I believe 2024 will bring better ways to get things done—some cutting-edge and others decidedly low-tech. Here are five trends to watch:
1. SOFTWARE TEAMS EMBRACE EFFICIENCY METRICS—BUT NOT BY ALL MEASURES
Table stakes in business departments like sales and HR, performance metrics are coming for software developers. Next year, look for more companies to concede that measuring their development teams’ efficiency is doable—and a good thing.
Expect more debate over the practice, too. A recent McKinsey report favoring measurement got blowback from developers, with some warning it could encourage busy work.
But as long as metrics are used properly—to help speed up software delivery, improve quality, and lift productivity—developers don’t mind them. For example, if code changes are languishing in review for two days when they should really take six hours, wouldn’t an engineer want to know?
For developers, much of the bias against measurement is rooted in previous attempts, which would simply count lines of code produced and then reward people accordingly. With metrics, the emphasis should be on finding inefficiencies in the system, not on volume or compensation.
2. INTERNAL DEVELOPER PLATFORMS COME INTO THEIR OWN
Goodbye, wikis. Hello, internal developer platforms.
IDPs are self-service portals that offer engineers easy access to a wealth of development-focused tools, services, and information. In 2024, IDPs promise to replace the ubiquitous wikis developers wade through for everything from coding best practices to where to find the restroom.
At heart, IDPs aren’t all that complex or cutting-edge. But they are intuitive, easy to use, and efficient—a long-needed, user-friendly platform for engineers to find a single source of truth.
For a new hire joining a team of hundreds, an IDP can explain who’s working on what and how different pieces of code fit together. Developers can use it to quickly create a back-end service, an API, or a website. With an IDP, they can also access key details for all software components the company is running and search technical documentation.
These platforms are gaining momentum. In a recent platform engineering survey, half of companies that said they use IDPs had adopted them over the past three years.
3. CLOUD DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENTS KEEP ENGINEERS GROUNDED
You’ve likely suffered the frustration of the Apple spinning wheel of death. Increasingly, software developers face a similar roadblock. Engineers have traditionally written code on their laptops, using the same device to check it for problems. But now, the sheer number of apps in play turns it into a brick. Testing just two lines of changed code can take 20 minutes.
That’s where cloud development environments come in. CDEs let engineers move the high-bandwidth parts of the development process—building, testing, and deploying code—to what’s effectively a powerful remote computer. When developers are working remotely, raising the risk of code leaks, CDEs can also bolster security.
By taking care of hosting, CDEs can deliver financial benefits too. Engineers spend 8% of their productive hours troubleshooting local development environments. For a team of 100, that’s almost $1 million a year in lost time they could regain by using a CDE.
4. DEVELOPERS FEEL THE HEAT ON API SECURITY
Duolingo, T-Mobile, and X (formerly Twitter) are just a few businesses recently hit by breaches involving application programming interfaces. Keeping APIs—the pieces of code that let software apps connect with and “talk” to each other—safe from hackers is now the paramount security issue in tech.
Attacks have become an epidemic. Over the past two years, 60% of organizations surveyed suffered an API-related data breach.
That’s a growing headache for developers. Thanks to the “Shift Left” trend, which sees software teams test for flaws early in the development life cycle, more security-related work has fallen into their laps. APIs, formerly created without security considerations at the fore, have become a big responsibility.
Fortunately, there are increasingly smart tools that leverage AI to provide a complete picture of every API a company has created. They also analyze traffic spikes and other anomalies, identifying potential threats and protecting against attacks.
5. THE RETURN TO OFFICE GETS REAL
Who’d have thought a whiteboard would be the most valuable tool for a software engineering team? After years of remote work, developers and their companies are increasingly seeing the value of getting together, in person, to solve a problem. In 2024, I predict the RTO trend for devs will accelerate.
Contrary to the popular image of the solitary coder, software engineering is about brainstorming and solving problems together. At my office, we recently started having team members return three days a week. This mirrors a broader trend. In a global survey between April and May 2023, tech companies reported that on average, 46% of their desks were in use, more than double a year earlier.
Helping drive RTO is a looser tech talent market, which gives employers more leeway to ask people to come back. Time at the office is also fast becoming the norm again in every industry, with 90% of companies in one poll saying staff will return by the end of 2024.
The ROI isn’t hard to understand. For engineers, a vigorous debate is always better in person than on video. And even in our AI age, you really can’t beat a whiteboard for mapping out software architecture or debugging code.
A combination of new tools and perspectives promises to shift the developer experience forward in 2024. By making efficiency a priority, reducing toil, measuring performance, minimizing downtime, and maximizing collaboration will all rise to the top of the priority list.