With the advent of digital and advanced technologies such as AI/ ML, organizations will experience significant changes with respect to their functioning and mode of conducting business. Innovation will play a pivotal role for businesses to enhance existing, or create new processes, products and business models. Digitization and continuous refreshing of business models will take a front seat.

How technology will be applied to achieve digital transformation will undergo a sea of change.

Current challenges

There are several challenges that organizations encounter while embarking on their digital transformation journeys:

• For business users, the development and deployment process is extremely complex and time-consuming.
• For application composers, frequent software/feature updates and integration of the same is a major challenge.
• For developers, the challenge is two pronged:
  • Diverse and distributed development teams
  • Seamless integration across multiple technology stacks and tools

Future state of applications

In the future state, application development experience will become an active, role-centric assembly of business capabilities to dynamically reflect an organization’s differentiated business practices.

Low code, no code platform assisted by AI capabilities will be the foundation for citizen development for the future of next-gen app engineering.

• Application Libraries will become Libraries of Business capabilities.
• Internal, vendor and open marketplaces will emerge to offer preassembled collections or individually packaged business capabilities, which offer access via APIs and event channels.

Application composition

To enable an advanced approach to developing applications, creating an adaptive, composable app creation process and be future ready,

• Democratized Tools will support businesses to assemble Application Experiences
• Organizations will use democratized design and development tools, augmented by artificial intelligence (AI), to draw on business capability marketplaces and custom development in order to create business application experiences.
• Integration will be an essential enabler of new application experiences
• At runtime, assembled application experiences will operate on a hybrid integration platform that provides governance, security, interoperability, scale and adaptability.

organizations will need to work on improving the developer and architect experience enabled through an engineering shift:

• Bots will help across the life cycle.
• Reference architectures can be provided as guidance for any given requirements.
• Code blueprints can be defined by architects so that code is templatized and standardized.
• Architect should be able to choose the right set of design patterns.
• Review Assistant: Self Heal/ Auto Correct Assistant can help in self-healing and auto correction. Logs can be analyzed to flag errors and ways to fix the errors are given as suggestions.

Day in the life of an architect

• Bots integrated with Visual Studio: These Bots can help in code review, code remediation, help connect with experts.
• Developer assistants can assist the developer by helping in recommendations, providing best practices/checklists
• Bots can add / update design patterns into the code.
• Tools, Extensions in visual studio can help improve developer experience and productivity.
• Built-in Intelligence can be built to suggest what areas the developers have to focus learning
• Code will be cleaned for maintainability and endurance periodically.
• Self-Healing Code Assistants can go through code corrections and apply them on other pieces of code before a new build starts. Logs can be analyzed to flag errors and suggest ways to fix the errors.

Conclusion

Therefore, a market like custom application development services with a value of 43.6 Billion USD can be further expanded and tapped into by organizations by making themselves future-ready. They can also become competitive by working toward improving both developer and architect experience. It will also help them to overcome the challenges posed by digital transformation and create smarter enterprises.

Rekha Kodali

Principal Architect, CTO as well as the Solution Design and Strategy Head for Microsoft Practice.

Rekha’s core competency, accumulated over 22 years of professional experience, includes enterprise architecture and Microsoft technologies. She has designed large solutions on a multitude of technologies and acquired various industry-recognized certifications, which include TOGAF 9.0, Azure AI, IASA, Office 365, BizTalk Server, SharePoint etc.

Avanindra Jha is a part of the strategic marketing team at Wipro and brings with him varied experience of business marketing across a range of geographies and industry domains. He is passionate about the latest technological advances happening across industries and organizations and aims to build expertise in integrating technology with marketing to drive the revenue-marketing engine.