As the chaos known as 2020 draws to a close, the world is starting to look towards 2021 to anticipate the kinds of changes, advancements, and new things awaiting on the horizon. If the past year has taught the world anything, it's that change is the only constant to count on. This means that companies must always prepare for the unknown while adapting to change or they'll find themselves left in the past. This year, that's translated into shifting technology trends required to meet the ever-evolving needs of users, consumers, and supply chain systems.
After the changes of 2020 and in anticipation of what's to come in the next, company owners are looking to find ways to make their organizations successful by any means necessary. For some, that means turning to a software development outsourcing company, such as BairesDev, to accomplish their software dev goals and projects.
However, the software development field hasn't gone unaffected by the challenges and changes of 2020 either. The skilled professionals working within this area must constantly learn new skills and adapt to stay relevant parallel to the advancements in technology. Outsourcing itself continues to grow as companies must scale their teams down internally or find themselves with an increase in demand without the skilled professionals required to get things done.
The Software Development Outsourcing Trends of 2021
While the experts expect the following trends to grow even more in importance and use in the coming year, 2020 showed the world that predicting everything is absolutely impossible. However, here are the best guesses for what 2021 will look like in the world of software development, technology, and outsourcing in general.
● IT and software outsourcing will continue to boom. - As companies feel the unfortunate need to scale down their teams and cut employees for one reason or another, they must still get their IT and software dev tasks done. This is when company leaders find themselves turning to skilled third-party outsourcing partners.
However, this is becoming somewhat difficult due to a combination of a global skills shortage mixed with the popularity of outsourcing. Sometimes these companies meet their own internal capacity and companies must look elsewhere. Outsourcing has quickly turned from a way to streamline work timelines while saving money to a critical component of successful businesses.
● Work from home will continue. - As no one can really expect when the state of the world will go back to "normal", chances are that work from home will establish itself as a norm. This specifically impacts the world of technology and development within companies as businesses must go to great lengths to protect their data in a work from home environment for the employees.
Many companies were not set up for remote working, but have already found themselves needing to deal with it in the current situation. While work from home is not going anywhere, companies will find themselves turning to technological solutions such as cloud computing, hybrid clouds, and increased security measures to protect themselves.
● Artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things will gain even more popularity. - These two items have been on every end-of-year list for the past several years - and they'll continue to claim their spot. Artificial intelligence helps businesses become smarter and more efficient by streamlining systems, better predicting what customers will buy, adding intelligent capabilities to software, adding structure to unstructured data, and so on.
The Internet of Things helps companies gather data via statistics gathering, providing real-time feedback, personalized communication, and interpreting issues with equipment. This helps improve overall customer satisfaction while making their lives easier.
● Continuous integration and deployment will reign supreme in software development. - The goal of this practice is to cut down the cycle of feature delivery in total while making bug fixes an easier, more frequent process and allowing for more flexibility in the dev cycle. Continuous delivery means that app developers release the products into production for rigorous testing while continuous deployment automatically updates them.
The shared repository for code means that testing is much easier and accelerated for delivery. Software development teams then have the ability to continuously improve functionality while seamlessly making bug fixes to deliver products at a much faster rate than other deployment cycles.
● Human augmentation will gain more popularity. - Human augmentation is the technology that's used to replace, enhance, or complement the natural capabilities of humans. Specialized outsourced software developers help make the programs and write the code to run such unique technology.
This includes tech built into or used externally to help humans with disabilities, such as restorative tech for sight and hearing, as well as those used to improve natural abilities. It will only continue to grow and expand in use cases to make human lives easier and to help us adapt to the post-2020 world.
While this year has proven that no one ever really knows what's in store next, businesses and organizations can count on these trends to continue their popularity streak and become even more important in the coming months.
