Software development has changed dramatically in the last fifty years and will continue to change. Its future course is of particular interest to developers, in order to gain the correct skills, and to any person faced with a strategic information technology (IT) decision. It is commonly accepted that computers will play an ever-larger role in modern civilisation. There are many unknowns, but the IT decisions made today will affect the competitiveness and preparedness for tomorrow. Awareness of the central issues that will affect the future of software development is the best form of preparation. This paper presents a view of the future of software development based on the history of software development and the results of two surveys.

Software development tools and techniques have changed considerably in the last half century, are still changing, and will continue to change in the future as hardware capabilities improve and new technologies make new methods of processing and communication possible.

The aim of this paper is to draw conclusions about the future of software development from trends that can be identified in its evolution to date. The results of two surveys will help to illustrate some of these trends. The first was a questionnaire survey aimed at software developers which asked them to compare their First and Last Project in terms of a number of criteria. The second was a survey of job advertisements in the Computing SA newspaper over a ten year period.

There are many facets of IT systems development. This paper will address the advancing generations of programming languages which have gained and lost popularity over the survey period. The evolution of coding styles and software architecture will be briefly described. The growing importance of user interfaces will be explained, in addition to a brief description of the increasing complexity of applications from user and developer perspectives. The final section will describe the future trends that can be projected from these points.

The earliest computers were developed just prior to and during the Second World War. The first applications of computers were to gain some form of military advantage based on doing many mathematical calculations very quickly, such as decrypting codes (Arnold, 1991, pp.32-35). Computers began to be used in business to speed up administrative tasks (Leveson, 1997, p.130). Online transaction processing and later, the personal computer, introduced a whole new dimension to computing by allowing people without programming training to use computers.

The challenge for software developers is to create programs that enhance the lives and work of those who use them. These users need the appropriate tools and techniques which facilitate this. This section begins by describing the software development evolution. The development of programming language generations and their usage is addressed.

In the early generations of programming languages, machine and assembly languages, the code was written at the level of machine instructions. This meant that many statements were needed to accomplish simple calculations. Therefore, programs were long and errors were easily introduced, but difficult to identify and remove.

HLLs differ in the amount of abstraction that they provide. Visual Basic (VB) offers a higher level of abstraction than C++, as can be seen in Figure 1, in the operation to change the mouse pointer.

Figure 1: Levels of abstraction in Visual Basic and C++

There is one statement in VB, but several in C++. The higher the level of abstraction, the fewer the lines of code to achieve the same goal. This then reduces the time required to write the program and there are fewer opportunities to introduce errors. Less code in the program also makes it easier and quicker to debug. However, there is usually a performance penalty when the level of the language is higher. Flexibility is also decreased as the level of the language increases because the programmer has less control over the exact way in which the processing is done (McConnell, 1996, pp. 345-368).

Non-procedural languages take abstraction even further, with the programmer coding the desired result, not the method for achieving it. Historically, procedural languages have been the most commonly used type of language as other language types are slower and more resource intensive. However, recent improvements in computer performance and language optimisation has meant that currently, there is a greater use of the other types of languages. The most widely used non-procedural language is SQL, a query language used to access data in relational databases (McDermid, 1991, p.44/3; Kimball, 1996, pp.xxi-xxii; Watson, 1989, pp.79-81).

Table 1 shows a definite trend towards higher level languages with over three quarters of the Last Project being done using fourth generation languages (4GLs). This can be attributed to increasing pressure to produce systems more efficiently together with the development of more powerful 4GLs (McConnell, 1996, pp.2,345).

Table 1: Language Generation by Project

Table 2: Most Sought-after Languages by Year

Figures = percentage of skills per newspaper issue.

Thus, there has been a move to higher level languages. There has been a shift away from some long established languages with the new computing environment dominated by the graphical user interface and the Web in particular. The next section will describe the evolution of coding styles.

Chart 1: Most Sought-after Languages

As seen in the previous section, languages have become more powerful and have raised their level of abstraction. The programming language chosen for development may either encourage or discourage certain programming practices depending on their features. This section highlights some of these coding styles.

Table 3: Coding Style by Project

Table 4: Coding Style by Language Generation

Thus there has been an evolution in programming styles to promote modularisation, data hiding, and reuse. This allows systems to be developed more quickly, to have better quality and to be easier to maintain. Software architecture has also changed considerably resulting in different development opportunities and challenges which will be discussed in the next section.

The previous sections showed that using modern coding styles can help developers to produce and maintain systems more efficiently. These styles have been supported by different languages in different eras. The eras can be broadly described in terms of changing software architecture. Software architecture is the units and the interfaces between them that make up an IT system (Jacobson et al., 1997, p.171). The evolution in software architecture is as a result of the changing capabilities of hardware, and increasingly distributed and integrated systems.

The network model was the first de facto database model in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The databases were, however, dependent on the application development language and many vendors produced incompatibile products (Fortier, 1997, pp.187-188). The relational model, proposed in 1970, was independent of the application development language using the database and many applications could access the same database (Deen, 1985, p.77). This meant that the organisation was not bound to a particular language for development (Hughes, 1988, p.4-5). As far as possible data was only stored once, random access was very quick, and large amounts of data could be handled efficiently (Deen, 1985, p.3-6). The relational model has become popular due to the simplicity of database structure, the flexibility of relationships, and the richness of data manipulation (Fortier, 1997, pp.207,244).

These systems began using the three-tier application architecture (Figure 2), which is also the architecture of the Web. Applications are divided into three layers or tiers known as P-A-D, presentation, application and data. Each tier can be handled by different computers and developed in different languages. Not only are the layers of the application split onto different computers, but each layer, especially the application and data layers, may also be split over multiple computers making it scalable. System maintenance and modification is facilitated by allowing changes to one tier or component without affecting the others (Edwards, 1999, pp.3-11). Providing the client with a Web interface greatly simplifies distribution and platform problems (Goldman et al., 1999, p.38).

Figure 2: Three-tier Web architecture

IT systems are commonly developed for access in a distributed environment, giving non-IT people access to information resources and data processing power. This makes the user interface particularly important in development. Changes in common user interfaces are described below.

Thus the user interface is one of the most important aspects of IT systems, especially as they are becoming more complex from a number of perspectives, which are discussed below.

The user interface is one of the primary factors determining the success of a system. Applications are becoming more powerful but also more complex for developers to produce. This complexity arises from increasing integration with other systems and utilising the growing power of computers to produce better information. These trends are discussed in terms of groupware, multimedia, multiple language development, and team work.

Groupware is a relatively new set of technologies that allows for easier communication and collaborative work by means of a computer network. This increases user productivity and the ability to share information. It is based on five technologies: e-mail, calendaring and scheduling, workflow, conferencing, and electronic meetings. The Web is a very good medium for deploying groupware technologies, but needs to have enhanced security to make it viable (Goldman et al., 1999, pp.177-178, 217).

Table 6: Number of Languages by Project

Table 7: Number of Languages by Interface

Table 8: Team work by Project

Thus applications are becoming more complex, both in terms of functionality offered and consequently in their development. Now that some of the important factors of the past and the present of IT systems development have been discussed, some thoughts on the future need to be presented.

With the rapid rate of change in the IT field it is very difficult for developers to see what the future trends might be. After analysing the past changes and current situation the following points are suggested as likely directions for the future of software development in the short term.

The trend of moving to higher level languages is sure to continue in the effort to produce quality systems efficiently. Hardware advances make the processing overheads incurred by these languages less significant.

There needs to be some consolidation in Web development and there are likely to be numerous tools and languages developed that attempt to do this. One technology that may prove important is Microsoft’s ASP+ Web Forms, which will allow the development of Web applications in a similar way to Visual Basic. Compiled programs are created that execute on the server and send HTML to the client. The developer base using Visual Studio and the ease with which these developers can produce complete Web applications and the increasing usage of ASP (see Chart 1 above) will surely make this a technology to watch in the coming months. (Microsoft, 2000a; Microsoft, 2000b).

Developers will experiment with other types of languages, such as Haskell which has been used to greatly improve the efficiency of animation. These non-conventional languages may come to be used more often for the things that they can do best, in order to produce the rich applications that will be developed in the future (Microsoft Research, 2000).

The Web is likely to play a role in most systems development projects, especially as XML is developed to allow for more powerful applications. A specific example is the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), a protocol that could provide the interface between virtually any two systems as long as they support both hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) and XML. That means a VB application could use CORBA services on a UNIX box or JavaScript clients to invoke code on a mainframe. So far SOAP has support from a number of industry leaders including Microsoft, IBM, Lotus, SAP, Commerce One, and Hewlett-Packard. It is hoped that Sun will add its support shortly and furthermore, that no vendor produces an incompatible version of SOAP (Skonnard, 2000; Berst, 2000b).

Thus the future of IT systems development will have increasingly stronger tools that allow developers to produce systems that address ever more complex functionality, thereby building applications that will enhance the user’s productivity, not restrict it. As the tools become more powerful more of the technical correctness will be supplied by the tool, but more creativity will be required of the developer to adapt to and to use new technologies to produce better IT systems.

IT systems play a vital role in modern civilisation. There is virtually no industry that does not use some form of computerisation and many are totally dependent on computers to control their operations. Software development will change unrecognisably in the future, as it has in the past, and it is not possible to predict how with any certainty (Leveson, 1997, p.129). This paper attempts to present the future of software development, in terms of the following factors from its past.

Programming languages have seen to be continually raising the level of abstraction, hiding the details of implementation from developers. This allows them to focus their efforts on achieving the best solution, rather than how to do it. The languages used have changed with the type of the majority of applications that are developed. Currently, as well as in the near future that means the most widely used languages will be visual development languages that produce Web applications. Coding styles have evolved methods for making programs easier and quicker to develop and to maintain by building them out of units which can be changed independently and re-used in many systems. The independent units include the splitting of the application into data, logic and presentation tiers with interfacing protocols to make applications flexible and scalable. The user interface has become an increasingly important part of applications as they become more powerful and are used by people of all levels of experience to improve their efficiency, rather than just automating tasks.

Thus this paper has drawn some conclusions about the future of software development in order for current developers to make themselves better prepared to meet the challenges that lie ahead.

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