{"id":21180,"date":"2019-01-10T13:38:25","date_gmt":"2019-01-10T19:38:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.planview.com\/five-predictions-for-the-coming-decades-of-software\/"},"modified":"2019-01-10T13:38:25","modified_gmt":"2019-01-10T19:38:25","slug":"five-predictions-for-the-coming-decades-of-software","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.planview.com\/five-predictions-for-the-coming-decades-of-software\/","title":{"rendered":"Five Predictions for the next Decade of Software Delivery"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Throughout this<\/span> series of articles<\/span><\/a>, I have been exploring the state of the practice in DevOps, summarizing recent trends in scaling software delivery. In this post – originally written for a special issue of<\/span> IEEE Software<\/span><\/i><\/a> to celebrate software engineering’s 50th anniversary – I look further ahead to consider how software engineering will evolve over the coming decades. My five predictions stretch far enough into the future that they aren’t intended to be precise; they aim to provide discussion topics for the shape of software engineering trends to come.<\/span><\/p>\n

These predictions resulted from <\/span>a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the University of British Columbia (UBC) Computer Science Department<\/span><\/a> in May 2018. I participated in a panel of UBC alumni that discussed topics ranging from AI’s future impact to where computer science students should focus today’s studies to have the best job prospects.<\/span><\/p>\n

During that panel, I used a key discovery from the research that led up to<\/span> Project to Product<\/span><\/i><\/a> to make a case for using an economic model of technological cycles when considering the decades ahead. In <\/span>Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital<\/span><\/i>, Carlota Perez proposes that in the last three centuries we’ve experienced five “great surges of development.”1 <\/sup><\/span>Other Kontratiev-wave or “long wave” theories continue to be debated for modeling the diffusion of new technological waves. <\/span><\/p>\n

Perez’s model is unique in specifying that each wave consists of an Installation Period and a Deployment Period. During the Installation Period, a critical factor in production becomes cheap, and infrastructure is built to exploit it. During this period, a constellation of innovation, entrepreneurship, and financial capital drives a surge. Next comes a disruptive Turning Point, followed by a Deployment Period of stabilization that results in widespread productivity gains for the new technology.<\/span><\/p>\n

During a conversation I had with Perez in June 2018, she stated her belief that we’re still at the Turning Point. Although it’s impossible to know today whether the pattern Perez describes will repeat itself, I’ll use the model to make some predictions here. In particular, the Turning Point theory provides historical examples of the kinds of disruption that DevOps and agile are trying to address. This is the case I make in <\/span>Project to Product<\/span><\/i><\/a>, where I discuss the Turning Point’s effects on technology organizations that need to scale their software delivery practices to survive the next decade.2 <\/sup><\/span> Consequently, my predictions are based on how software engineering will need to change as we shift from this Turning Point to the Deployment Period.<\/span><\/p>\n

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