I am giving the keynote at the VSLive conference this month in New York City titled the “Developer of the Future”. As we all know, the software development industry is constantly evolving. While it may be difficult to see those changes day to day, the effects are very apparent from year to year, and what makes a developer or development project successful certainly changes as a result. So, making predictions is always risky and prone to a notoriously low rate of success.

I could focus on the near term and state obvious trends — the demand for developers will not subside. Or, I could stretch far into the future (where no one can prove me wrong anyway) and talk about how “Software will eventually write Software.” Instead, I’m going try to find middle ground – take some risks with my predictions and make those predictions near enough that someone might actually hold me accountable in the coming years.

Applications that just a couple of years ago were available only on a single desktop platform are now available in the cloud or as apps that run on one or more phones/tablets. This trend clearly indicates where the software development market is heading — make the same application available on a multitude of platforms (desktop, phone, tablet, web, etc.). For developers, this means that a new type of expert will soon emerge. Let’s call him or her the “general expert”. The general expert will be valued over the many “narrow experts” that we have today. In the past, being a narrow expert in a single stack such as Windows or SQL Server was seen as a positive. Going forward though, developers will need to navigate across multiple languages and technology platforms to launch a single project.

Moving from the developer to the development team, teams will no longer be able to afford to produce big bang roll-outs and will need to reply upon continuous deployment workflows. Today, services already lack the familiar concept of a version number. What version of gmail are you using? It won’t be long before most applications will also lose their “version” identity. Users will simply expect to be running the latest version of whatever may be on (or connected) to their device. If you use Chrome today, I bet you don’t know what version you have – Chrome is already silently updating itself.

Customer expectations are higher than ever before and their attention spans are shorter. Developers that don’t have an understanding of what drives customer behavior, especially those who are trying to sell apps via marketplaces, will be at a huge disadvantage. Customers eat with their eyes; applications must be visually appealing and dead simple to use.

In any design project you’ll make some good decisions and some bad ones, but you won’t know for certain which is which until you find out from your customers. Rather than try to speak with all of your customers (they won’t always tell you the truth anyway), the use of Application Analytics or Telemetry will be an increasingly important aspect of the software development process. Applications should report back and make “actionable” the production incidents that cause unhappy users. They should also make generic usage information actionable as well (adhering to all privacy concerns of course) to allow for continual improvement based on real world usage and split testing. This is important whether you are building a mobile app, a desktop client application or a mission critical server application.

In summary, in addition to domain expertise, it is more important now than ever to have a broad understanding of platforms and technologies. Also, while understanding of technology is critical, knowledge of your customers, how they use your applications, and what’s important to them about the apps are just as critical. There’s no time like the present (don’t wait for the world to change around you). Get a head start by implementing feedback mechanisms inside your apps today, and make feedback driven development a reality, rather than a vision of what could be.

For more information on how PreEmptive Solutions is helping development today, see: http://www.preemptive.com/pa