SD Times March 2023

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David Rubinstein

Go 1.20 adds profile-guided optimization

The Go team has announced the release of Go 1.20, which features four language changes and changes in the implementation of the toolchain, runtime, and libraries.

It also includes a preview for profile-guided optimization (PGO), a new feature that allows the compiler to perform optimizations based on runtime profile information. According to the team, providing a profile can speed up applications by about 3-4%. They hope to improve this further in future releases.

The language changes include the ability to convert a slice to an array, comparable types can now satisfy “comparable” constraints, struct values now get compared one field at a time, and the “unsafe” packages added three new functions: SliceData, String, and StringData.

Some of the tool improve-

People on the move

ments include the ability of the “cover” tool to collect coverage profiles of whole programs; acceptance of a -pgo flag in the “build,” “go install,” and other commands to enable PGO; and more.

Google plans for conversational AI in Search

Around the same time Microsoft announced its changes to Bing, Google also unveiled plans to incorporate more AI into Google Search. It announced Bard, a conversational AI service based on the LaMDA model.

Bard is intended to foster the combination of knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of Google’s language models. The AI service utilizes information from the web to offer users high-quality responses.

The team stated that Bard is initially being released with Google’s lightweight model version of LaMDA, which calls for less computing power so it can

be scaled to a larger user base. The launch wasn’t without flaws; An ad for Bard from Google’s Twitter account included an incorrect answer about the James Webb Space Telescope, which Reuters was first to point out. According to Reuters, after this incident, Alphabet (Google’s parent company) shares dropped $100 billion, with trading volumes during that day being about three times the 50-day moving average.

JFrog releases Conan 2 to improve C++ development

Liquid software company JFrog and the team for Conan, which was acquired by JFrog back in 2016, announced the release of Conan 2.0, providing developers with the ability to model advanced C and C++ application dependency graphs and software binary packages. This release is intended to make it simpler for developers to securely reproduce artifact builds as well as accelerate the delivery of products at scale.

with lockfiles to “pin down” all of the versions of software dependencies, providing organizations with a framework for reproducing builds and speeding up their CI/CD pipelines without sacrificing agility.

.NET 8 focuses on DevX, cloud native

With .NET 8, Microsoft wants to focus on the developer experience for cloud-native developers and cross-platform development with MAUI and Blazor, as well as continued performance improvements.

This preview includes improvements for container imagers, such as adding Debian 12 as the default distribution for container images, allowing containers to be run by non-root users, and tagging container images with the 8.0-preview tag.

There are a number of Linux improvements too, including the ability to build .NET from the dotnet/dotnet repository, new Ubuntu Chiseled images, and updates to the minimum baseline targets.

n Asana has made two new hires: Shannon Sullivan Duffy as new chief marketing officer and Neeracha Taychakhoonavudh as head of customer experience. Duffy was previously EVP Cloud & Industry Marketing at Salesforce and before that had held roles at Facebook, Jigsaw, and SourceForge. Taychakhoonavudh also hails from Salesforce, where she spent 13 years, most recently as EVP Global Customer Success.

n Derek Holt has been promoted to CEO of Digital.ai. He has been at the company since 2020 and was previously general manager of Intelligent DevOps. Holt will replace Stephen Elop, who will step into the role of executive chairman for the company.

n Allstacks has announced that Evan Welchel is joining the company as chief revenue officer. Prior to joining Allstacks, Welchel was vice president of marketing at Tonkean. Before that he held senior marketing positions at Ansible, Cypress.io, GitLab and Red Hat.

Conan 2.0 offers several new features and capabilities, including a new “signing” plugin in order to help better secure the software supply chain. This allows organizations to add signatures to their software packages so their applications can be protected from malicious third-party code.

Conan 2.0 also provides improved comprehension of the relationship between various portions of the software components. According to JFrog, this gives developers power over their time so teams can more efficiently re-use binaries.

Lastly, users gain access to better scalability and security

Visual Studio 2022: Reduce friction in dev workflows

Microsoft incorporated a number of features into this release that are designed to reduce friction in daily development workflows.

A number of productivity enhancements were made, including all-in-one search and Intent-Based Suggestions. Allin-one search enables Visual Studio users to find files, types, and members in code. With this release the company has significantly improved the underlying infrastructure so that results are better ordered

by how relevant they are. Search also now has a Preview Panel that will provide better context for search results.

Intent-Based Suggestions provides suggestions based on recent changes in the code. It utilizes AI to try to understand repeated edits of code and suggests more changes that are inline with those.

Enhancements to Razor and C# include support for code actions, such as shortcuts like “Remove Tag” and “Insert Image height/width,” and improved performance during project configuration, code analysis recognition, and when typing.

Tricentis extends Testim platform to mobile devices

Tricentis is attempting to meet the growing demand for high-quality mobile applications by releasing Testim Mobile, a mobile extension to its testing platform Testim

According to Tricentis, testing for mobile applications can pose a lot of challenges, because unlike browsers, phones and tablets can vary widely in performance, size, and operating system

With Testim Mobile, testers can use either physical devices or emulators in testing, and tests can also be run in parallel across those different testing options

Devices can be set up and configured in minutes using the Tricentis Mobile Agent, which helps to also simplify device management

SwaggerHub Explore offers API visibility

SwaggerHub Explore enables developers to learn more

Microsoft rolls out ChatGPT-enabled version of Bing

This announcement came shortly after the company made a multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT

Microsoft says that integrating ChatGPT into Bing will help provide better search results, more complete answers, a new chat experience, and the ability to generate content

Search powered by ChatGPT will surface relevant information like sports scores, stock prices, and weather, and summarizes search results to provide comprehensive answers to complex queries too For example, you would be able to ask how to substitute eggs in a recipe and get instructions on how to do so without actually having to search through multiple results yourself

Just like with ChatGPT, you can also converse with Bing in a new chat experience that allows you to keep refining your search until you are able to get the result you need.

about API behaviors, allowing them to cut back on time and effort during the integration process.

This release brings developers a free API exploration tool that allows them to speed up the development lifecycle by offering the ability to visualize API data in one place as well as evaluate functionality prior to investing time in API integration.

According to Smar tBear, this is a major developer challenge that SwaggerHub Explore is intended to fix while also speeding up the development of high-quality software with limited resources.

“SwaggerHub Explore is a developer-centric tool that brings new innovation to the SmartBear API lifecycle portfolio of solutions,” said Sean Butler, vice president of product management at SmartBear.

GitHub Copilot paid tier offers code suggestions

The AI developer tool GitHub Copilot is now being offered through a new Business subscription

The new subscription tier

has a more advanced OpenAI model and new capabilities to improve the quality of GitHub Copilot’s code suggestions. GitHub has updated the underlying OpenAI Codex model to gain scale improvements to the quality of code suggestions and a reduction of time to serve suggestions.

A new paradigm, Fill-In-theMiddle (FIM), was added to give developers better prompts for code suggestions. GitHub Copilot has been restructured to take into account not only the prefix of code but known code suffixes as well. This additional context gives the program a better understanding of how the code is written and how it should fit with the rest of the program. Through its improved accuracy, FIM in GitHub Copilot is able to provide high-quality code suggestions without any added latency, according to the company.

Lastly, the GitHub Copilot extension for VS Code was updated with a light client-side model that improves overall acceptance rates for code suggestions.

The company stated that it plans to integrate AI into every aspect of the developer experience, whether that’s coding to

the pull request to coding deployments, and Copilot for Business is the first step.

Copilot for Business is available for $19 per user per month.

2023 Call for Code: Sustainability through AI

The 2023 Call for Code, a global program that invites developers around the world to contribute to open-source technology projects that address social and humanitarian issues, has recently been announced by creator David Clark, founding partner IBM, charitable partner United Nations Human Rights, and program affiliate with the Linux Foundation

This year’s Call for Code is intended to encourage the development of AI-powered technology projects that target sustainability issues in order to fight against climate change

According to Clark, Call for Code 2023 challenges developers around the world, students, and startups to build and contribute to solutions that help push sustainability forward by improving resource management, reducing pollution, and protecting biodiversity z

Observability has really taken off in the past few years, and while in some ways observability has become a bit of a marketing buzzword, one of the main ways companies are implementing observability is not with any particular company’s solution, but with an open-source project: OpenTelemetry.

Since 2019, it has been incubating at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, but the project has its origins in two different open-source projects: OpenCensus and OpenTracing, which were merged into one to form OpenTelemetry.

“It has become now the de facto in terms of how companies are willing to instrument their applications and collect data because it gives them flexibility back and there’s nothing proprietary, so it helps them move away from data silos, and also helps connect the data end to end to offer more effective observability,” said Spiros Xanthos, SVP and general manager of observability at Splunk.

OpenTelemetry is one of the most successful open-source projects, depending on what you measure by.

According to Austin Parker, head of DevRel at Lightstep and maintainer of OpenTelemetry, it is the second highest velocity project within the CNCF, only behind Kubernetes, in terms of contributions and improvements.

According to Parker, one of the reasons why OpenTelemetry has just exploded in use is that cloud native development and distributed systems have “eaten the world.” This in turn leads to increased complexity. And what do you need when complexity increases? Observability, visibility, a way to understand what is actually going on in your systems.

Parker feels that for the past few decades, a real struggle companies have run into is that everyone has a different tool for each part of observability. They have a tool for tracing, something for handling logs, something to track metrics, etc.

“There’s scaling issues, lack of data portability, lack of vendor agnosticism, and a lack of ability to easily correlate these things across different dimen-

Why the world OpenTelemetry

BY JENNA SARGENT BARRON

sions and across different signal types,” said Parker. “OpenTelemetry is a project whose time has come in terms of providing a single, well-supported, vendor-agnostic solution for making telemetry a built-in part of cloud native systems.”

Morgan McLean, director of product management at Splunk and cofounder of OpenTelemetry, has seen first-hand how the project has exploded in use as it becomes more mature. He explained that a year ago, he was having conversations with prospective users who at the time felt like OpenTelemetry didn’t meet all of their needs. Now with a more complete feature set, “it’s become a thing that organizations are now much more comfortable and confident using,” Morgan explained.

Today when he meets with someone to tell them about OpenTelemetry, often they will say they’re already using it.

“OpenTelemetry is maybe the best starting point in that it has universal support from all vendors,” said Xanthos. “It’s a very robust set of, let’s say, standards and open source implementation. So first of all, I know that it will be something that will be around for a while. It is, let’s say, the state of the art on how to instrument applications and collect data. And it’s supported universally. So essentially, I’m betting on something that is a standard accepted across the industry, that is probably going to be around for a while, and gives me control over the data.”

It’s not just the enterprise that has jumped on board with OpenTelemetry; the open-source community as a whole has also embraced it.

Now there are a number of web frameworks, programming languages, and libraries stating their support for OpenTelemetry. For example, Open-

needs

vendors to have open-source standardsbased data collection, so that they can have more effective observability tools, and they can have control over the data,” said Xanthos. “So because of this demand from end users, essentially all vendors either decided or were forced to support OpenTelemetry. So essentially, there is no major vendor and observability that doesn’t support it today.”

OpenTelemetry’s governance committee seats are tied to people, not companies, which is the case for some other open-source projects as well.

“We try to be cognizant of the fact that we all work for people that have commercial interests here, but at the end of the day, we’re people and we are not avatars of our corporate overlords,” said Parker.

For example, Morgan and Parker work for two separate companies which are direct competitors to each other, but in the OpenTelemetry space they come together to do things for the project like form end-user working groups or running events.

metrics,” said Morgan.

Another long-term focus will be capturing profiles from applications so that developers can delve into the performance of their code.

The maintainers are also working on client instrumentation. They want OpenTelemetry to be able to extract data from web, mobile, and desktop applications.

“OpenTelemetry is very focused on back end infrastructure, back end services, the stuff that people run inside of AWS or Azure or GCP,” Morgan explained. “There’s also a need to monitor the performance and get crash reports from their client applications, like front end websites or mobile applications or desktop applications, so they can judge the true end to end performance of everything that they’ve built, not just the parts that are running in various data centers.”

The promise of unified telemetry

Telemetry is now integrated into .NET, Parker explained.

Having a healthy open-source ecosystem crucial to success

There are a lot of vendors in the observability space, and OpenTelemetry

“threatens the moat around most of the existing vendors in the space,” said Parker. It has taken a lot of work to build a community that brings in people that work for those companies and have them say “hey, here’s what we’re going to do together to make this a better experience for our end users, regardless of which commercial solution they might pick, or which open-source project they’re using,” said Parker.

According to Xanthos, the reason an open-source standard has become the de facto and not something from a vendor is because of demand from end users.

“End users essentially are asking

“It doesn’t matter who signs the paycheck,” Parker said. “We are all in this space for a reason. It’s because we believe that by enabling observability for our end users through OpenTelemetry, we are going to make their professional lives better, we’re going to help them work better, and make that world of work better.”

What’s next?

OpenTelemetry has a lot planned for the future, and recently published an official project roadmap.

The original promise of OpenTelemetry back when it was first announced was to deliver capabilities to allow people to capture distributed traces and metrics from applications and infrastructure, then send that data to a backend analytics system for processing.

The project has largely achieved that, which presents the opportunity to sit down and ask what comes next.

For example, logging is something important to a large portion of the community so that is one focus. “We want to be able to capture logs as an adjacent signal type to distributed traces and to

At the end of the day, it’s important to remember the main goal of the project, which is to unify telemetry. Developers and operators are dealing with increasing amounts of data, and OpenTelemetry’s purpose is to unify those streams of data and be able to do something with it.

Parker noted the importance of using this data to deliver great user experiences. Customers don’t care whether you’re using Kubernetes or OpenTelemetry, he said.

“Am I able to buy this PS5? Am I able to really easily put my shopping list into this app and order my groceries for the week?” According to Parker this is what really matters to customers, not what technology is making this happen.

“OpenTelemetry is a foundational component of tying together application and system performance with end user experiences,” said Parker. “That is going to be the next generation of performance monitoring for everyone. This isn’t focused on just the enterprise; this isn’t a particular vertical. This, to me, is going to be a 30 year project almost, in terms of the horizon, where you can definitely see OpenTelemetry being part of how we think about these questions for many years to come.” z

College dropout turned self-taught coder and business owner named to Forbes 30 under 30 2023

Growing up, many people expect to follow the same basic steps: graduate high school, go to a good college, and ultimately land a job that pays well — with bonus points if you actually enjoy it.

However, the universe oftentimes makes it a point to teach us that life is not always meant to be predictable. Sometimes even the best-laid plans have to fall apart in order for something even better to come together.

This happened to be the case for Cavan Klinsky, a self-taught coder; cofounder of the API-first solution for modern health care delivery, Healthie; and a recipient of a spot on Forbes 30 Under 30 2023 for health care.

Klinsky found his life path altered after being diagnosed with a chronic heart condition in his first year of high school at the prestigious Horace Mann School in the Bronx.

“I first became interested in engineering after I had to have open heart surgery as a freshman in high school,” Klinsky explained. “Basically, for weeks over the course of the following summer, I couldn’t really exercise or run around or do most of the things I would spend a summer doing. I was really stuck in my bedroom, which led me to become a lot more serious about engineering and that is when I built out my first web application.”

He expanded on this, saying that, at the beginning, his coding education came largely from his own Google searches along with a surplus of free time.

After that initial spark of interest,

BY KATIE DEE

“So, we built an MVP and launched that and started making sales very quickly with a very young product and then that summer we got into an accelerator program called Techstars, which pretty much required us to go full-time… the company just kept growing and growing and it has now been seven years.”

He went on to say that while the company was founded in November 2015, it did not reach profitability until around four years later

Klinsky said that he mainly learned through repetition and the hands-on experience he gained from experimenting with sample code in order to determine what did and didn’t work.

He continued to foster his engineering skills throughout high school and after graduation went on to attend the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School for business.

Focus on the business

However, after meeting Erica Jain, his future Healthie co-founder, during his winter break of freshman year, Klinsky decided to take what he thought would just be one semester off from school to invest all his time into starting their business.

“She had come from a health care background and I came from a background of building out MVPs and small projects for other businesses, so she knew a lot about the space and I knew a lot about building stuff,” Klinsky said.

“We really wanted to build a stamina business, so one of the things we can tell our customers is that we are going to be around in 10 years,” Klinsky said. “So, I would say that we have been cash efficient since day one, but we didn’t end up breaking profitability until 2019 or 2020.”

He explained that building this business took a massive amount of patience, as it did not see the rate of growth it currently has overnight.

Rather, Klinsky said that Healthie has experienced the most growth in the last few years, leading it to where it is today, working with thousands of health care organizations and covering millions of patient lives.

“I think we have really caught on to something and found a great place to be in the market and a great piece of software delivery and we have seen great growth with that,” he said.

Expanding the scope

He explained that the original vision for Healthie was to be a platform for individual dietitians, but after feedback from users Klinsky and Jain decided to

Cavan Klinsky, co-founder of Healthie.

expand its functions and transform it into a core, underlying infrastructure for large digital health care companies

Today, the company ’ s software API helps health care companies of varying sizes deliver the best care possible by providing them with a scheduling, engagement, and electronic medical records platform that enables the building of lasting relationships with patients

Klinsky knows firsthand that people often find themselves at their most vulnerable when they are seeking out health care That being said, navigating the industry while also trying to advocate for their own care can feel like a daunting task

This is why, according to Klinsky, Healthie’s ultimate goal is to lessen stress and foster a more positive relationship between patients and their health care providers

“Anybody who has experienced health care in this country has seen how broken it is, and there are all of these people out there with great ideas, great plans, great experience, and a great knowledge base about how to solve this problem,” He said. “But what they’re really worried about is delivering health care so they’re not necessarily focusing on the technology, the infrastructure, or the back end and those other very important but very time-consuming pieces.”

Klinsky also said that when it comes to running a business and growing a startup, the most important thing is to normalize and embrace the journey, no matter what it looks like He emphasized that running a business is a continuous learning process and even when it feels like you ’ ve made it, there is still more to learn and improve upon

He explained that he has always approached managing his engineering team in the same way he looks at growing the business as a whole: listening and responding to feedback in order to provide the best end result possible

Now, at just 26 years old, Klinsky has been recognized for his success and named to Forbes 30 Under 30 2023 in the health care category

According to Forbes, this came after Healthie raised $18 million in venture funding and helped millions of organizations and patients in areas such as chronic pain, cardiac rehab, addiction treatment, weight loss and others

“We have seen great growth in the last couple of years but we are still really just getting started,” Klinsky said. “So, the vision and the goal is to become this really widespread platform that makes it really really easy to launch and scale new types of digital care. ” z

Surely you Jest – now it integrates with Jazzer.js

BY S D T I M ES

engine,

Jazzer js is a free, coverage-guided, in-process fuzzer spanning the Node.js platform. It is currently available within JavaScript’s node package manager

With this, developers can use Jest for both functional and security testing without the need to leave their development environment

According to the company, the integration offers developers the ability to run automated security tests that are complementary to their existing unit tests and allows them to test JavaScript applications for hidden bugs

Code Intelligence also stated that it will be bringing the ability to receive specialized bug detectors for critical vulnerabilities to Jazzer js These include remote executions, cross-site-scripting, and injections

“While most JavaScript developers already use Jest for functional testing, to test whether their application behaves as expected, our new Jest integration allows developers to also do negative testing. This is to check their applications for unexpected or strange behaviors It does not only avoid security issues but makes the code more reliable and reduces outages and bad user experience,” said Werner Krahe, product director of Code Intelligence.

The Jest integration enables developers to call Jazzer.js by using the new it fuzz() function in describe() blocks

This function works to call fuzz tests that use coverage feedback to generate several unused and unexpected test inputs that have the ability to trigger security vulnerabilities as well as functional bugs. z

AI in API and UI software test automation

BY IGOR KIRILENKO

Artificial intelligence is one of the digital marketplace’s most overused buzzwords. The term “AI” conjures up images of Alexa or Siri, computer chess opponents, and selfdriving cars.

AI can help humans in a variety of ways, including reducing errors and automating repetitive tasks. Software test automation tools are maturing and have incorporated AI and machine learning (ML) technology. The key point that separates the hype of AI from reality is that AI is not magic, nor the silver bullet promised with every new generation of tools. However, AI and ML do offer impressive enhancements to software testing tools.

More software, more releases

Software test automation is increasing in demand just as the worldwide demand for software continues to surge and the demand for developers increases. A recent report by Statista corroborates this expectation with a projection that suggests that the global developer population is expected to increase from 24.5 million in 2020 to 28.7 million by 2024. Since testing and development resources are finite, there’s a need to

make testing more efficient while increasing coverage to do more with the same. Focusing testing on exactly what needs to be validated after each code change is critical to accelerating testing, enabling continuous testing, and meeting delivery goals.

AI and ML play a key role in providing the data needed by test automation tools to focus testing while removing many of the tedious, error-prone, and mundane tasks. API and UI automated software testing augmented by AI benefit teams in the following ways:

l Improve static analysis adoption.

l Improve unit test creation.

l Reduce test maintenance.

l Reduce test execution.

l Increase API test automation.

l Improve UI test automation.

Real examples

Let’s look at some real-life examples of what happens when you apply AI and ML technology to software testing.

Improve unit testing coverage and efficiency. Creating unit tests is a difficult task since it can be time-consuming to create unique tests that fully test a unit. One way to alleviate this is by making it easier to create stubs and

mocks with assisted test creation for better isolation of the code under test.

AI can assist in analyzing the unit under test to determine its dependencies on other classes. Then it suggests mocking them to create more isolated tests.

The capabilities of AI in producing tests from code are impressive. However, it’s up to the developers to continuously invest in and build their own tests. Again, by using AI test creation assistance, developers can:

l Extend code coverage through clones and mutations.

l Create the mocks.

l Auto-generate assertions

Improve API testing. The struggle to improve API testing has traditionally relied on the expertise and motivation of the development team because APIs are often outside the realm of QA. Moreover, APIs are sometimes poorly documented. Creating tests for them is difficult and time-consuming.

When it comes to API testing, AI and ML aim to accomplish the following:

l Increase functional coverage with API and service layer testing.

l Make it easier to automate and quicker to execute.

l Reuse the results for load and performance testing.

Igor Kirilenko, Parasoft’s VP of Development, brings more than 20 years of experience in leading engineering teams, with a specialization in establishing and promoting the best agile practices in software development environments.

This technology creates API tests by a n a l y z i n g t h e t r a f f i c o b s e r v e d a n d recorded during manual UI tests. It then creates a series of API calls that are collected into scenarios and represent the underlying interface calls made during the UI flow An ML algorithm is used to study interactions between different API resources and store those interactions as templates in a proprietary data structure The goal of AI here is to create more advanced parameterized tests, not just repeat what the user was doing, as you get with sim-

ple record-and-playback testing. Automate UI testing efficiently. Validating the application’s functionality with UI testing is another critical component of your testing strategy. The Selenium UI test automation framework is widely adopted for UI testing, but users still struggle with the common Selenium testing challenges of maintainability and stability

AI helps by providing self-healing capabilities during runtime execution to address the common maintainability problems associated with UI testing

AI can learn about internal data structures during the regular execution of Selenium tests by monitoring each test run and capturing detailed information about the web UI content of the application under test This opens the possibility of self-healing of tests, which is a critical time-saver in cases when UI elements of web pages are moved or modified, causing tests to fail

Remove redundant work with smart test execution. Test impact analysis (TIA) assesses the impact of changes made to production code The analysis and test selection are available to optimize the execution of unit tests, API tests, and Selenium web UI tests To prioritize test activities, a correlation from tests to business requirements is required However, more is required since it’s unclear how recent changes have impacted the code. To optimize test execution, it’s necessary to understand the code that each test covers and then determine the code that has changed. Test impact analysis allows testers to focus only on the tests that validate the changes.

Benefits of AI/ML in Sof tware Testing

AI and ML provide benefits throughout the SDLC and among the various tools that assist at each of these levels Most importantly, these new technologies amplify the effectiveness of tools by first and foremost delivering better q u a l i t y s o f t w a r e a n d h e l p i n g testing be more efficient and productive while reducing cost and

risk

For development managers, achieving production schedules becomes a reality with no latecycle defects crippling release timetables For developers, integ r a t i n g t e s t a u t o m a t i o n i n t o their workflow is seamless with automated test creation, assisted test modification, and self-healing application testing. Testers and QA get quick feedback on test execution, so they can be more strategic about where to prioritize testing resources. z

AI increases efficiency of Selenium-based UI test automation with self-healing applied during execution.

BY K AT I E D E E

While every developer is different, there is one thing that almost all of them have in common: the desire to build Developers do not want to be bogged down by dependencies or constantly having to pause and answer questions from a helicopter manager; they just want to create

This is why the job of the project manager should revolve, almost exclusively, around enabling developers to do just that However, it can sometimes be difficult to keep developers happy and building while also staying on top of progress and pushing the project forward

How the role has changed

According to Sílvia Rocha, VP of engineering at OutSystems, the skills that make project managers successful have undergone a transformation in the last two decades.

“I think before, when our projects were very much waterfall, the role of a project manager was a little more on the forefront of the governance, ” Rocha said “And now with the flourishing of agile practices, I think project managers have moved a little bit to the side ”

communication skills

Yishai Beeri, CTO at the developer workflow automation company LinearB, said interpersonal communication skills are key when it comes to building trust with developers.

Dev Manager SERIES

“If you can trust the developers to tell you when things are not progressing as required or when things are starting to accumulate risk, then you can focus solely on these things and assume that everything else is going as planned,” Beeri said

towards helping them,” she said Additionally, Beeri explained that avoiding the blame game is essential when it comes to communicating and building trust with a team.

He emphasized that project managers should always care more about solving the issue than pointing a finger at any developer who may have had a hand in causing it.

She explained that with this shift towards more agile practices, projects often have multiple leaders, such as Scrum masters and product owners

Because of this, project managers have had to reinvent themselves quite a bit

Rocha also cited a heightened level of autonomy at the team level as a reason why the role of the project manager is changing

“I think a lot of rethinking and redesigning of what that role is and the interactions that the project manager has is something that I have definitely seen the industry do,” she said.

One of the ways that the role has been altered is the added emphasis placed on empathy and interpersonal

Building this trust also allows project managers to not automatically feel worried when team members are not constantly offering up status updates When everyone trusts each other to make issues known, then silence becomes a positive thing

Rocha went on to explain that in the choice between a project manager with higher level technical skills and one with superior interpersonal skills, the latter would most likely provide better outcomes

“Putting things in a simple and outcome-focused way and letting the team know that you are there to assist and that you are there to remove dependencies and roadblocks for them lets them know that you feel their pain, that you realize what it is like to be in their shoes, and that you are actively working

“And I think a lot of this takes time and it comes from having worked together for some time and learning to understand each other's cues or way of communicating,” Beeri said “It can be hard to replicate that without the experience of working as a team and working together to understand how different people communicate about the same things ”

How PMs can benefit developers

In an SD Times-led discussion on the “ D e v I n t e r r u p t e d ” D i s c o r d s e r v e r, Connor Bronsdon, co-host of the Dev Interrupted podcast, explained that project managers can either be a benefit to the team, or a massive hindrance

“Ideally, they'll enable engineers to focus on deep work, particularly coding,” Bronsdon said. “However, it's very easy for project management to turn into a blocker if the system is constructed in a way that breaks up focus time and creates switching costs.”

He went on to say that project man-

agers should be intentional when it comes to creating the right system for the developers on their team, and they should be sure that the developers understand why the system is important

“If you don't create a system that works for your team, and ensure they have the context they need about why the project manager system is important, you're going to create problems,” Bronsdon explained

In that Discord discussion, Beeri added that a common mistake project managers make is always chasing the current status on every item

He expanded on this, explaining that if the project manager is constantly asking for status updates or time estimates while developers are untangling and working through complicated problems, it can end up slowing progress in the long run.

“ A g r e a t p r o j e c t m a n a g e r h a s enough dev chops to get a feel for p r o g r e s s w i t h o u t c o n s t a n t l y a s k i n g , know how to use tools to augment their take on reality, and have the patience to manage the project with the uncertainties inherent to dev work,” Beeri said “They also proactively manage up to shield devs from the execs/stakeholders that are also standing in line to ask ‘when will it be done?’ five times a day ”

Bronsdon explained that it can be easy for a project manager to become frustrated if it seems like developers are dragging their feet on providing the manager with information or updates that are vital to their role

Understanding that the challenges developers face are different from the manager ’ s own helps to create a path to reach a resolution that leaves everyone feeling heard and validated

“This requires excellent communication skills and the ability to tailor that communication to your different audiences, ” Bronsdon said.

Accommodating a remote setting

Rocha also discussed how the transition to remote work has altered the

role of the project manager She said with less face-to-face opportunities, project managers have had to find new ways to tap into the working processes of their teams

S h e s a i d t h a t p r o j e c t m a n a g e r s struggled with this and often tried to overcompensate for the distance by injecting themselves too deeply into the work developers are doing, leading them to become overbearing with their teams

Beeri also noted that since going remote, offering developers high-level empathy has become a bigger challenge than ever

He explained that because so much of a human being’s capacity for communication and empathy relies on non-verbal cues, the mediums of communicating in a remote working world have become a hurdle for project managers to overcome.

“Some of these non-verbal cues get

lost in screen-based communication And in some cases this also makes scheduling hard when you do have to synchronize people together,” Beeri said “Getting everyone in the room together is obviously easier when we ’ re all in the same office, so those parts have become more difficult ”

Rocha stressed that the project manager should constantly be positioning themself as a helper rather than as merely a process guide

“Especially building a new product from the ground up a lot of the work that is happening for these products is very overarching and one of the things that will make you a rock star project manager is if you are actually helping in the alignment across the many teams in a way that developers see as valuable,” she said. “Then they see that dependencies are better catered to, they can go faster, they are more productive, they are not stuck waiting on other teams.” z

Prioritizing the developer

When trying to foster open communication and understanding, it is important to also be mindful of the developers’ time

Yishai Beeri, CTO of the developer workflow automation company LinearB, explained that oftentimes project managers fall into the trap of overloading their team with meetings in an attempt to facilitate communication He warned that this is an almost-instant productivity killer

“[Constant meetings] also give the project manager a feeling (some would say illusion) of control,” Beeri said “Like ‘I know what's happening and I know where we're going,’ but great project managers are comfortable with uncertainty ”

He went on to say that a good project manager is one that centers their communication around risk areas and blockers as well as pushing context to the developers instead of pulling status updates from them

According to Beeri, good project managers utilize asynchronous communication options wherever possible and only utilize synchronous avenues to tackle real problems

This works to allow developers to be more in charge of their own time, fostering heightened productivity as well as a better relationship between team members and the manager

He also stressed the importance of managing dependencies as a project manager He warned not to fall back on old and anti-Agile habits such as trying to map out the dependencies and timeline in advance

Rather, Beeri advised project managers to focus on gaining “local” visibility to current and near-term dependencies

“[A good project manager should] suggest minor shifts in order of execution to resolve them, as well as focused over-communication to mitigate their impact,” he explained. “They also develop a nose for common dependencies/blockers down the line and proactively suggest steps to avoid them.” z Katie Dee

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Jira suite updates mean to ease collaboration

BY DAV I D R U B I N ST E I N

Atlassian fleshed out its Jira suite with a new product Jira Product Discovery and the availability of other tools designed to more fully bring together all of the roles that are part of software development creation and delivery

The company also announced the free integration of its Jira Work Management tool into Jira Software, and a new slant on its Jira Worfklow Templates now designed by customers According to Atlassian’s Agile solutions head of product Megan Cook, the integrations with the Jira Software suite helps organizations ideate, prioritize and jumpstart their efforts to deliver software that will make a real impact on the software’s users.

Jira Product Discovery, which is available in an open beta for which customers can sign up, was created to help organizations identify which new product features to build, based on research, customer feedback and internal prioritization Cook pointed out that this traditionally has been an unstructured effort “Software teams have efficient

processes in place for building the software and managing it once it’s out there, and dealing with incidents,” she said “But when it comes to discovery, that’s often been a bit of a black box ”

So decisions on what to build often are made in a vacuum, or driven by

Jira Product Discovery provides a dashboard into which all the ideas for a product can be viewed, and each idea is matched to a business outcome It also can help with prioritization, based on data such as strategic value, user impact and more “You can define anything that’s important to the team and the team can actually see which goal this [feature] is supposed to hit, how much impact to the users, and what does it rank in terms of advancing as a strategy?,” Cook explained

what Cook called “the loudest voice in the room, ” rather than being about the outcomes the company needs to drive.

The interested parties develope r s , p r o d u c t m a n a g e r s , m a r k e t e r s , executives come into the room with their spreadsheets, backlogs, mental notes and emails, and debate and discuss and prioritize features together

But Atlassian believes it’s critical for all these teams to get aligned before any code gets written, to help ensure what will be built will achieve the organization’s goals

Because Jira Product Discovery brings transparency to the decisionmaking, all the roles around development can contribute to the product, each with their own diverse ideas. This, Cook noted, connects what was invisible about product development to the rest of the business, giving all stakeholders a view of all the ideas as well as the ability to rank the value of each, which leads to better decisions and better outcomes for the company “So product managers can gather their team, they can set the impact and effort scores for each idea to see what will drive impact for the customer and the business,” she said z

ConnectALL 2.11 introduces Logic Flow Adapters

BY

J

E N

N A SA R G E N T BA R R O N

ConnectALL 2 11 is the latest release o f t h e v a l u e s t r e a m m a n a g e m e n t (VSM) company ’ s flagship VSM platf o r m C o n n e c t A L L i s c a l l i n g t h i s release a “complete overhaul” of the platform, providing a more modern UI and stronger VSM capabilities

Logic Flow Adapters were added to the platform in this release These allow users to incorporate business logic into their value streams, based on inputs from multiple different applications.

Users write and manage custom scripts for these in a single hub, which allows them to create and execute scripts

without doing anything in the back end

“We want you to imagine a world where we turn chaos into predictability; a world with ConnectALL, where you can have complete control of flow; where integration and automation is not a bottleneck; where integration deployments are hours and not weeks,” said ConnectALL President & COO Lance Knight “With ConnectALL 2 11, you can now connect to any solution in the value stream and have visibility into all the applications in your ecosystem.”

In this release ConnectALL has also updated its Universal Adapter, which is a tool that enables users to build new

connections from configuration data

The Value Stream Visualizer has also gotten an update

This is a tool that enables users to create, modify, and take action on automations from a value stream diagram It includes a list view for more easily managing automations and filter options for finding granular information that will help users focus on and manage specific teams

“With this latest release, ConnectALL continues to empower the real drivers of VSM humans to automate their entire value stream, as well as gain unprecedented visibility into activities at every stage of the process, ” said Knight. z

‘You can define anything that’s important to the team.. and the team can actually see which goal this [feature] is supposed to hit. ’

Megan Cook, Atlassian

Open-source software sees growth across the board

BY JA KU B L E W KO W I C Z

As the use of open-source software (OSS) continues its year-over-year growth, the biggest area for innovation and open-source adoption is now AI.

But the growth of OSS is in every area, relied upon by companies for a wide range of business-critical applications, including d

orchestration, and DevOps and SDLC tooling.

According to the 2023 State of Open Source Report from OpenLogic by Perforce Software, 80% of organizations increased their use of open-source software over the last 12 months.

“The big piece here is, the number one reason to use open source is for access to innovation,” said Javier Perez, the chief OSS evangelist and senior director of product management at Per-

force and one of the leading authors behind the report

And AI is the new ‘king of the bill’ of OSS, according to the report “The AI overtaking container technology was probably what stuck out the most when looking at the data,” Perez added

Explosion of data an AI driver

The need to juggle and draw insights from rapidly increasing quantities of data has been a driving factor for AI.

“Demand for services powered by AI/ML/DL technologies is exploding,” said Stefano Maffulli, executive director of the Open Source Initiative. “The vast amounts of data these applications

ingest give rise to serious implications when it comes to licensing and privacy in this ‘growth at all costs’ era The [OSI] is researching the AI/ML/DL space to help enterprises and individuals get clear definitions of their rights and obligations when it comes to data and AI systems ”

Start a conversation or open your laptop and it doesn’t take long for OpenAI’s GPT-3 model to come up ChatGPT, DALLE-2, and more models are making this a big year for AI adoption While users have to pay for regular use of GPT-3’s offspring mentioned above, the core GPT-3 AI model remains open source There’s even talk about a GPT-4 on the horizon

Despite all of the new players in the open-source AI field, Google’s TensorFlow, which offers a flexible ecosystem o f t o o l s , l i b r a r i e s , a n d c o m m u n i t y resources that lets researchers push the state-of-the-art in ML, is still the most used project.

While this project has been around since 2015, it received some major updates last year, including enhancements to DTensor, the completion of the Keras Optimizer migration, the introduction of an experimental StructuredTensor, a new warm-start embedding utility for Keras, and much more

PostgreSQL tops in OS databases

At the same time that AI is generating and analyzing vast amounts of data, the data is now more commonly going to open-source database technologies

“We’re talking about very large volumes of data that has to have to go somewhere So it will go to Apache Kafka or Apache Spark or Cassandra, some of those technologies that are becoming more and more popular,” Perforce’s Perez said

The three major players in the open-source data technologies field PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MongoDB have secured the top three spots over the last several years.

According to OpenLogic’s OSS report, MySQL and PostgreSQL swapped places by a few percentage points and now PostgreSQL is the most

used data technology. PostgreSQL has seen the most growth, passing MongoDB last year, and inching out MySQL this year to secure the top spot

M

priseDB whose product is based on PostgreSQL said that the database isn’t even used to its full potential today

“It’s easy to use Postgres in 99% availability of SLAs And we help customers get to five-nines of SLA And a lot of people don’t understand or don’t realize that you can do that reliably with Postgres today,” Linster said

“This is the thing that happened with Linux a good while ago Linux started at the print server Then from the print server to the file server, then to the department server, and today it runs everything ” Linster said “Well, the same thing is happening with Postgres.”

Kubernetes, containers see growth

The other areas of open source that have seen considerable growth are Kubernetes and container technologies. The CNCF found that within its community, Kubernetes continues to mature and have the largest contributor base of any project

Kubernetes 1 26 was released at the end of 2022 with many storage improvements, including CSI migration for Azure File and vSphere graduating to stable Users also gained an improved metrics framework extension and Component Health Service Level Indicators to alpha

The maturing technology also had a podium finish by the end of the year Kubernetes usage increased by 5% in the past year, and with about 23% of the votes, it has become the third m o s t - u s e d c l o u d - n a t i v e t e c h n o l o g y, according to OpenLogic’s OSS report Aside from OpenStack, whose usage decreased by 10% compared to the last year, all other cloud-native technologies have seen an increase in the last twelve months.

The report also found that the usage of containers and container technology has grown significantly from 18% to

continued on page 19 >

How to ensure open-source longevity

BY JENNA SARGENT BARRON

Most code in existence today utilizes o p e n - s o u r c e c o m p o n e n t s , b u t i t ’ s important to remember where, and who, that open-source code comes from

O p e n - s o u r c e s o f t w a r e i s m o s t l y developed and maintained by volunteers Unlike a company with resources to hire more developers, the maintainers of most open-source projects have to carry the burden of what comes after them

For example, at the end of 2022, the m a i n t a i n e r s o f t h e G o r i l l a t o o l k i t announced they were archiving the project, meaning that they wouldn’t develop new features for it, and wouldn’t make any security fixes. Gorilla contains a number of different tools for Go developers, one of which is mux, a URL router and dispatcher that has been forked nearly 2,000 times on GitHub

W h e n t h e c u r r e n t m a i n t a i n e r s decided they wanted to move on, they had put out a call to the community asking new people to start contributing In their goodbye letter, they said the call wasn’t successful

“As we said in the original call for maintainers: ‘ no maintainer is better than an adversarial maintainer!’ just handing the reins of even a single software package that has north of 13k unique clones a week (mux) is just not something I’d ever be comfortable with This has tended to play out poorly with other projects,” the maintainers wrote in a farewell letter announcing the archiving of the project

Open source is like a garden

Tom Bereknyei, lead engineer at flox, likens open source to a garden. “Most people enjoy the scenery at almost no cost. Malicious people can ruin the

continued on page 18 >

How to ensure open-source longevity

< continued from page 17

place if left unchecked There are few gardeners and even fewer supervisors Some gardens are organized, some are chaotic Some have been around for generations, and some are abandoned after a month Maintenance can be invisible and thus not appreciated, until the moment that maintenance disappears,” he said

This doesn’t necessarily mean that open-source components should be avoided After all, Bereknyei points out that proprietary software doesn’t necessarily have guarantees either, as a company could go out of business or change things in a way you don’t like

But it is important to know how the open-source projects you rely on are planning for the future, and it underscores the importance of having trusted maintainers in the pipeline That way, when a top maintainer needs to leave the project, there is someone who has built that trust that can step up and do a good job stewarding the project.

“Being a good reviewer is a lot of work: you have to have a clear vision for a project and make sure contributions are consistent with that, in addition to making sure everything’s tested and documented,” said Jay Conrod, software engineer at EngFlow

The way to handle contributors and maintainers will vary depending on project size and company support For example, Conrod previously worked at Google where he was the maintainer of the projects rules go and Gazelle, and he has also worked full-time maintaining Go

At one point, maintaining rules go and Gazelle was too much in addition to his regular work His plan for transitioning off the project was to invite a group of regular contributors to become maintainers, providing them with write access to the project Then, over the course of a year he met with them regularly to continue solidifying the relationship

“I think this approach of inviting specific people, building relationships with them, and making sure they have the resources they need is important,” said Conrod

Climbing the leadership ladder

The Kubernetes project is a good example of this. According to Eddie Zaneski, software engineer at Chainguard and maintainer of Kubernetes and Sigstore, Kubernetes has a contributor ladder that is designed for helping people grow into leadership roles with the following rankings:

l Members, who are active contributors to the project and must be sponsored by at least two reviewers

l Reviewers, who are responsible for reviewing code

l Approvers, who can review and approve contributions

l Subproject owners, who are technical authorities on a specific subproject within Kubernetes

Each of these roles has increasingly strict requirements as you work up the ladder For example, in order to become an approver, you would have had to have been a reviewer for 3 months, been the primary reviewer for at least “10 substantial PRs,” reviewed or merged 30 PRs, and have been nominated by a subproject owner

According to Conrod, another way to ensure that an open-source project is maintainable in the long-term is having contributors from a number of different companies For example, with Go, though the majority of maintenance is done by Google, a few of the big packages are maintained by external contributors.

Conrod also emphasized the importance of building a strong community, in which people are able to ask each other questions, answer questions and just generally help each other out It can even lead to business partnerships or the creation of related projects

For example, EngFlow, is a business built around the open-source build project Bazel, and there are a number of open-source projects built on top of Bazel too Because of this, he believes that if Google ever stopped supporting Bazel, the Bazel community could continue on because there’s already so much existing expertise outside of Google

Chainguard's Zaneski believes that companies that benefit from using open-source technologies should also be committing time back to those projects His company practices what they preach, too, as Chainguard is one of the top contributors to Kubernetes

This would involve actively ensuring that a developer’s workload is such that they have the time to contribute to the projects He believes the bare minimum is enabling developers to spend 20% of their working time on contributions to open source.

Bereknyei also offered the advice to start a support contract with a maintainer if you rely on their project. “This provides a business relationship and goes a long way to ensuring support.” z

< continued from page 17

33%. This trend is uniform across organizations, regardless of their size

“ A s K u b e r n e t e s m a t u r e s , m a n y organizations turn to service mesh technology and those projects in CNCF like Envoy, Cilium, and Istio continue to cultivate large contributor communities to meet the demand,” Aniszczyk added

Other macro-trends observed by CNCF’s Aniszczyk were that the contributor base of OpenTelemetry is expanding, making it the second-fastestgrowing project in the CNCF environment Also, he stated that the usage of GitOps remains vital to the cloud-native environment, with projects such as Argo and Flux continuing to attract numerous followers and recently both achieving graduation from the CNCF

OSS challenges persist

While OSS use is expanding at most organizations, some challenges still persist.

“Clearly, more technical support is needed for open-source technologies, as personnel experience and proficiency is highly ranked again this year as a

support concern across organizations regardless of size,” Perez said. “Inhouse support of OSS requires expertlevel knowledge of not just one technolo g y, b u t m u l t i p l e t e c h n o l o g i e s t h a t form software stacks ”

Rod Cope, CTO at Perforce Software, added that open-source communities are not time-bound by any SLAs, which means one could be waiting days or even weeks to get technical support if there are skill shortages in an organization

The security aspect of open-source is number one but that is always going to be the case, Perez predicts “It’s just human nature and no matter what you do they’re going to say that’s the most important challenge,” Perez said

Another challenge is that like most technologies, not every open-source system is created equally, and not every system is as open as it claims to be. When using a “captive open source ” project, an organization runs the risk of being locked into a system.

Captive open-source projects are the projects that were created by a company that now has a tight grasp over

Backstage moves front and center with the help of CNCF

One important project that has quickly moved up the ranks in the CNCF is Backstage, which enables developers to bring together their organization’s tooling, services, apps, data, and documentation into a single UI

“Backstage a year ago barely made this list and continues to grow, solving an important pain point around cloud-native developer experience,” Chris Aniszczyk wrote in a blog post that identified the most important open-source projects in the CNCF and Linux ecosystems last year

The Software Catalog, which is the core feature of the project, makes it simple to create service blueprints that can be shared between teams It also enables teams to keep track of the ownership and metadata of all services within the engineering organization

The project was originally created at Spotify in 2016 and was used as the company’s mission-critical tool for containing software chaos, empowering engineers to work faster and more efficiently It entered the CNCF Sandbox in September 2020 and was eventually voted in as a CNCF incubating project last March

“Software stacks are growing larger and more complex by the day Backstage was built to address issues like SaaS sprawl and cloud-everything which can make the developer experience complex,” said Erin Boyd, CNCF TOC member and project sponsor, in a blog post

Backstage has seen great progress since joining the CNCF, with growth in core components, features, plugins, adopters, contributors, and community engagement This has resulted in updates, refinements, documentation, deprecations, and stabilizations to the Software Catalog, Software Templates, TechDocs, and API Reference z

Top Open-Source Projects at CNCF and Linux Foundation

According to the Cloud-Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), here are the top 10 projects at the CNCF and Linux Foundation last year based on the number of commits, authors, and comments/pull requests.

CNCF

1 Kubernetes

2 OpenTelemetry

3. Argo

4. Backstage

5 gRPC

6 Prometheus

7 Envoy

8 Cilium 9 Istio 10. Dapr

Linux Foundation

1 Linux

2 Kubernetes

3. OpenTelemetry

4. Argo

5 Hyperledger

6 Zephyr

7 Node js

8 Backstage

9 Jenkins

10. gRPC

t h e f a t e o f t h e p r o j e c t , L i n s t e r explained. When they open-sourced the project, they made the source code accessible to the user, but the licenses can still be very restrictive.

“It sounds that the code is readable, but the limitations on how the code can be used are significant And those are also not recognized OSI licenses, so they’re not really open-source licenses in source available,” Linster said

They can change the license and can decide which features go in It’s only their decision how much these features cost, what the new license for those features is, Linster added

Luckily, most areas of open source have plenty of alternatives to choose from by now

“There are a number of companies commercializing open-source databases so if you use one, then you pay for what is called open core, so there are proprietary additional features and you might get locked in,” Perez said “But, at the same time, you can see in the OSS report that there are another 20 o p e n - s o u r c e d a t a t e c h n o l o g i e s o u t there. It’s no longer, ‘I need a database and Oracle is the enterprise database.’ Now there are so many options.” z

Low code spending to increase in 2023

Tools can mitigate cuts in other areas due to economic uncertainty

BY J E N N A SA R G E N T BA R R O N

In the current situation IT teams find themselves in, they are being forced to do more with even fewer resources. You’ve likely heard (or possibly been affected by) the swath of layoffs that have plagued the tech industry over the past several months IT teams are expected to continue outputting great work, except now their budgets have been cut, they have less staff, and are increasingly stretched thin

Low code is one of the solutions that can be utilized to combat some of the challenges that may be arising as a result of the current economic climate

According to Gartner, the low-code market will grow 20%. By comparison, Gartner also predicted a 5% increase in the IT sector as a whole in 2023.

Gartner defines the low-code market as being made up of a number of different technologies: application plat-

f o r m s , r o b o t i c p r o c e s s a u t o m a t i o n , integration platform as a service, and citizen automation and development platforms, to name a few

The largest market segment within low code is application platforms, but citizen automation and development platforms are the fastest growing segment; they are expected to grow by 30% in 2023. Low-code application platforms are those that minimize the

use of coding needed to create an application, while citizen development platforms are used to enable people who are not formal developers, such as an accountant or HR representatives, to create applications, according to Gartner

By 2026, Gartner predicts that citizen developers will make up at least 80% of the user base for low-code platforms (in 2021 it was 60%)

“The high cost of tech talent and a growing hybrid or borderless workforce will contribute to low-code technology adoption,” said Jason Wong, disting u i s h e d V P a n a l y s t a t G a r t n e r “Empowered by the intuitive, flexible and increasingly powerful features of low-code development tools, business technologists and citizen technologist personas are developing lightweight solutions to meet business unit needs for enhanced productivity, efficiency and agility often as fusion teams.”

John Bratincevic, principal analyst at Forrester, has seen that a lot more companies are investing in citizen development, and he expects this trend will continue At the end of last year, he published a case study on how the oil and gas company Shell Plc has scaled its citizen development program to over 4,000 employees

Making DIY a priority

O n e o f t h e k e y s t o t h e i r s u c c e s s , according to the report, was that they have a centralized Center of Expertise a n d h u n d r e d s o f d i s t r i b u t e d D I Y coaches. Cultivating small communities of citizen developers throughout the organization was important to their success.

In the next phase of their citizen developer journey, Shell plans to double the number of citizen developers and make DIY a priority in IT budgets.

“It seems like a lot of companies have gotten much more serious about citizen development, as I described So I expect to see more of those programs actually hitting scale,” said Bratincevic

He recalled a recent conversation with a financial company where they had 10-15 accountants using low code to create applications He asked why they didn’t just hire a consultant to come in and build something for them and the response was that they “didn’t have $5 million lying around for so-andso to come in and do this for me ”

“To her, it made a lot more sense to h a v e h e r s u b j e c t - m a t t e r e x p e r t s t o build these very important sophisticated applications, rather than pay consultants a bunch of money to do it on whatever product coding or logo,” said Bratincevic.

When low code first started gaining popularity, it was common for citizen developers to use it to create a simple app to automate part of their workflow.

Now, it is being used to create a

wider range of application types It’s not uncommon to see it used for customer-facing applications, Bratincevic said

“They’re increasingly a general purpose replacement for coding for a range of application use cases, ” he said

People will expect AI in their low-code platforms

The emergence of ChatGPT showed people what’s truly possible with AI Bratincevic expects that users will now demand AI capabilities in their lowcode platforms

“You and I actually have AI features in our normal tools that we don’t even think about,” he said. “So for example, when you ’ re using PowerPoint, and it suggests a layout, that’s AI.”

According to Bratincevic, examples of companies who are vocal about having these capabilities in their low-code offerings are OutSystems and Microsoft

M A R K E T FO R ECAST

l Gartner predicts a 20% increase in low-code spending in 2023

l They also predict that citizen developers will make up at least 80% of the user base for low-code platforms by 2026

l Forrester predicts more low-code platforms will incorporate AI features to make development easier

“I think it’s like anything else, it’s just going to make people more effective and faster, and help them learn things more quickly, right? Just like developers go out and grab code off the internet. Now they’ll grab code from some kind of feature the platform has, and I think it’ll be practical and useful,” said Bratincevic. z

April 12, 2023

A one-day virtual event

Organizations requiring a faster digital transformation are turning to low-code development solutions, empowering IT and non-IT personnel to use drag-and-drop tooling to quickly create necessary business applications.

Join us for the second Low-Code/No-Code Developer Day. This online event is designed to help organizations understand the use of low-code and no-code tools, where they are appropriate to use, and what they can deliver

Register for Free!

l Friends in low-code places by Cindy Van Epps

2022 Sessions

l Demystifying low code: Where to start? by Jason English

l Maximizing the value of hybrid dev teams in remote environments by Adam Morehead

l From ‘Hello World’ to the World at Large by Dawie Botes

l Crossing the Low-Code and Pro-Code chasm: A platform approach by Asanka Abeysinghe

l Designing a developer-led culture by Ricardo Miguel Silva

l How Medtronics created its LC/NC program by Lori Breitbarth

l Why now is the time for low-code CX by Stephen Ehikian

l Low-Code capabilities of digital product design platforms by Jason Beres

l Dispelling preconceived notions of DIY task complexity by Michiel de Bruin

433 people attended last year from these companies:

It all comes down to developers

What if I told you that this year was going to change the way developers build for unified communications, forever cementing a place in traditional industries like manufacturing and medicine?

We all know the critical role software developers have played as the driving force beyond today’s connected collaboration capabilities But I think that role will only expand and become even more foundational, including in areas that were just pipe dreams a couple of years ago

And no, I’m not talking about video conferencing I’m talking about changing the way we connect about code that can remotely control physical instruments thousands of miles away, new ways to shop or transact real estate, and tools for remote work collaboration that build real bonds between colleagues.

I’ve been mulling over the question of what new capabilities people will be developing this year. Here are a few thoughts:

Unify communications

This year, companies across all industries will work to unify their communications, and software developers will rise to the challenge of creating hyper-specific tools for different industries This will require developers to hone in on understanding and dissecting the problems of their industry partners to propel unified communications efforts Root cause analysis of industry problems will prove fertile ground for creative, out-ofthe-box solutions We’re seeing harbingers of this wave of development in the video-enabled headsets beginning to connect manufacturing supervisors with workers on the ground, or the drones ferrying vaccines to remote portions of Ghana to increase accessibility to preventative healthcare Developers, coming in with a systematic approach and logical lens, will be well-suited to create impactful solutions for traditionally analog fields

Reduce latency and eliminate downtime

With that growth in specialized unified communications will come urgency in reducing friction in connected devices. As more workstreams begin to rely on UCaaS (unified communications as a serv-

ice) technology, the effects of latency and downtime multiply As everyone has personally experienced, low latency serves as a barrier to retention, incentivizing customers to turn away from a site or give up on trying to make a new gadget work

Minimizing roundtrip latency also opens up a world of real-time remote applications Any applic a t i o n r e q u i r i n g r e a l - t i m e , p r e c i s e c o n t r o l s depends on low latency, so developers working on such products will be well suited to structure their networks and systems for lower latency

With some level of latency unavoidable, as well as users on low bandwidth connections, another management strategy involves researching the key pieces of the user experience and prioritizing those in the user interface.

Hybrid communication critical

Establishing clear and continuous communications pathways are critical to success in hybrid work environments.

This looks like software that works on any device, including mobile, and from any location With hybrid work trending across companies, and variations in preferred UCaaS providers, interoperability as a competitive edge will be sharper than ever Companies want to avoid vendor lock-in with their hardware purchases, acquiring tools that allow employees to work with external contacts as well as internal ones reduce friction and increase productivity

Developers will have an opportunity to reassure executives fretting about a lack of in-person collaboration, while preserving flexibility for employees to work in the location they find most productive This will look like enhanced virtual workplaces, next-generation conference room displays, and granular presence controls

It all comes down to developers

Without the tireless work of software developers, the products and solutions we love and use on a daily basis would not have come to fruition. As we embark on a new year, it will be critical for companies to enable software developers to work through today’s industry-specific issues, strengthen the connected devices proliferating in offices and home workspaces, and build for a flexible workforce. z

Tim Slagle is head of Developer Relations at Zoom

Software developers will rise to the challenge of creating hyper-specific tools for different industries.

Developers, SREs must collaborate

So f t w a r e e n g i n e e r i n g l e a d e r s n e e d t o f o s t e r

c o l l a b o r a t i o n w i t h s i t e r e l i a b i l i t y e n g i n e e r s ( S R E ) i n o r d e r t o s c a l e u n p l a n n e d w o r k a n d i m p r o v e c u s t o m e r e x p e r i e n c e S o f t w a r e e n g i n e e r i n g t e a m s t e n d t o f o c u s o n r e l e a s i n g n e w p r o d u c t f e a t u r e s q u i c k l y, w h i c h c a u s e s t h e m t o n o t a l w a y s p r i o r i t i z e t h e r e l i a b i l i t y o f n e w f e a t u r e s

Gartner predicts that by 2027, 75% of enterprises will use SRE practices organization-wide to optimize product design, cost and operations to meet customer expectations, up from 10% in 2022 Today, more than ever, customers are expecting applications to be reliable, fast and available on demand. When organizations present products that do not meet these expectations, customers are quick to seek other alternatives.

To improve product reliability, IT organizations are starting to adopt SRE principles and practices when designing and operating systems. However, SRE is rarely embedded into every product’s development life cycle. While software engineering leaders are engaging site reliability engineers, they are only performing occasional reliability exercises

Foster collaboration with site reliability engineers

Now is the time for software engineering leaders to be building lasting partnerships with site reliability engineers as a part of their continuous quality strategy by adopting SRE practices and tools Software engineering leaders will only be able to deliver the business value of their products to cust o m e r s i f t h e y a r e t r e a t i n g r e l i a b i l i t y a s a differentiating feature

S o f t w a r e e n g i n e e r i n g t e a m s s h o u l d b e a d d r e s s i n g r e l i a b i l i t y i s s u e s e a r l y o n i n t h e i r p r o d u c t ’ s l i f e c y c l e a n d c o l l a b o r a t i n g w i t h s i t e r e l i a b i l i t y e n g i n e e r s t h r o u g h o u t t h e e n t i r e t y o f a p r o d u c t ’ s d e s i g n a n d d e l i v e r y a c t i v i t i e s D o i n g s o i s m o r e t i m e - e f f i c i e n t a n d e c o n o m i c a l t h a n n e e di n g t o r e s o l v e a p r o d u c t ’ s i s s u e a f t e r i t h a s b e e n r e l e a s e d .

Collaboration with site reliability engineers can be fostered by defining service level indicators (SLIs) and service level objectives (SLOs) that capture customer expectations for both product reliability and product performance. SLIs and

SLOs will allow teams to clearly evaluate how well a product is meeting customer needs

Enforce an SLO action plan

Failure is an inevitable aspect of service delivery, so it is important that software engineering leaders have a plan of action to effectively manage risk

Design an action plan for each SLO with site reliability engineers This plan should provide guidance on what needs to be done if an SLO is breached, trending toward breach and/or the breach is imminent

Optimize development and design with SRE practices

To further a culture of reliability within their teams, software engineering leaders need to incorporate SRE practices and tools that drive lasting improvement. There are several activities software engineers should be performing with site reliability engineers in order to optimize development and design for meeting SLOs

toil management, and monitoring and observability

Blameless postmortems can be used to identify what is causing triggering events such as failure or SLO breach This practice allows organizations to learn and avoid repeating the same mistakes, and prevent future ones Chaos engineering uses experimental failure testing to uncover vulnerabilities This provides information about system behavior during failures and enhances software engineering teams’ ability to improve product design Toil management eliminates low-value work and repeatable tasks Lowering toil allows teams to focus more on meeting SLOs Monitoring and observability identifies the best methods needed to measure

Daniel Betts is a Senior Research Director at Gartner, Inc

Software engineering leaders [must] have a plan of action to effectively manage risk.