Predicts 2017: Application Development

Published: 28 November 2016 ID: G00316983

Analyst(s): Mike West, Maritess Sobejana, Joachim Herschmann, Keith James Mann

Gartner's 2017 application development predictions focus on lean/agile,

DevOps and enterprise-scale development practices, which will have a
major impact on organizations and how they build and manage systems.
This research provides application leaders with insight to guide their
planning processes.

Key Findings
■ As application development organizations mature in their use of lean, they will replace Scrum
with a methodology based on a combination of lean and agile practices.
■ Testing is no longer a stage in a DevOps delivery, but quality has become an integral activity
that impacts all areas.
■ In application development, two main types of advanced analytics — "predictive" and
"prescriptive" analytics — are gaining momentum and will continue to grow in the next three to
five years.

Recommendations
Application leaders focused on modernizing application development programs should:

■ Prepare for continued challenges to your development practices and cultural status quo as
lean/agile values become established. Do so by gaining competency in lean/agile thinking and
modeling the corresponding values and behaviors.
■ Adopt a continuous testing approach that prioritizes unit test and API test automation over UI
testing, and includes service virtualization, test data management and optimization, and test
environment management.
■ Understand the different capabilities of predictive and prescriptive analytics, as well as how and
when they can be used in the application delivery pipeline.

Table of Contents
 Strategic Planning Assumptions............................................................................................................. 2
Analysis.................................................................................................................................................. 2
What You Need to Know.................................................................................................................. 2
Strategic Planning Assumptions....................................................................................................... 3
Replay Prediction........................................................................................................................7
A Look Back.....................................................................................................................................9
Gartner Recommended Reading.......................................................................................................... 10

List of Figures

Figure 1. Minimum Building Blocks of Lean-Agile IT................................................................................3

Strategic Planning Assumptions

By 2020, 35% of application development organizations now using Scrum will use a software
development methodology based on lean/agile instead.

By 2020, DevOps initiatives will cause 50% of enterprises to implement continuous testing using
frameworks and open-source tools.

By 2020, 50% of IT organizations will apply advanced analytics in application development to

improve application quality and speed of delivery.

Analysis
How can IT leadership successfully drive application development (AD) modernization?

The modernization of AD will not succeed without application leaders embracing lean principles and
practices. Lean restructures development work toward its contribution to customer value streams.
Enterprises that follow this path will:

■ Move beyond Scrum as their primary development practice

■ Integrate quality processes into every phase of development and operations
■ Use analytics to drive refinements to DevOps processes as well as to the applications they
deliver

What You Need to Know

Meeting the challenges of the digital economy requires enterprises of all sizes to increase their
responsiveness to business needs. Application leaders, too, are facing increasing pressure to

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 improve the responsiveness of their AD organizations by incorporating new techniques and
practices that can speed up development without sacrificing quality. IT organizations need to deliver
new value more quickly with less risk, but IT in general and AD organizations in particular can't meet
the need. Lean IT concepts and techniques are instrumental in driving improvements in the overall
development life cycle and reducing risk in the process. Agile software development enables better
and faster delivery of software, but, without the collaboration of infrastructure and operations (I&O),
getting it into production quickly is not assured. DevOps facilitates that collaboration between
development and operations. Introducing agile product management and cross-team coordination
enables the scaling of development to enterprise-class (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Minimum Building Blocks of Lean-Agile IT

Source: Gartner (November 2016)

Strategic Planning Assumptions

Strategic Planning Assumption: By 2020, 35% of application development organizations now
using Scrum will use a software development methodology based on lean/agile instead.

Analysis by: Keith James Mann

Key Findings:

Scrum, the most widely used agile software development methodology, has not evolved along with
other aspects of AD. Recent advances in DevOps, enterprise development frameworks and even
waterfall methodologies are founded on lean principles, not agile ones. While Scrum remains at the
core of software development, it is becoming the constraint in the overall process. Scrum's fixed
sprint length limits deployment frequency, while its insistence on ceremonies prevents the
elimination of activities that become wasteful when teams outgrow them. As AD organizations

Gartner, Inc. | G00316983 Page 3 of 13

 mature in their use of lean, they will remove these constraints by replacing Scrum with a
methodology based on a combination of lean and agile practices.

Awareness and adoption of DevOps and enterprise agile frameworks are growing. Gartner survey
data shows that by the end of 2017, 64% of organizations will be using DevOps. Almost half (49%)
are using or considering an enterprise framework, a market led by lean/agile frameworks such as
Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) and Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS).

Market Implications:

End-user organizations and technology service and software providers have invested heavily in
supporting Scrum. While this approach has been successful, in 2018 and beyond, the growth in
markets such as training, certification and tools will be in lean/agile. Some vendors are already
showing strong support for lean/agile as customer adoption of such enterprise frameworks
increases and as partnerships are established. End-user organizations should examine the lean/
agile tools and capabilities offered by their vendors. Providers should establish product and service
roadmaps now to meet customer demand.

Recommendations:

■ Application leaders in organizations that are using Scrum (or Scrum within DevOps) and an
enterprise development framework: Be prepared to switch to a lean/agile methodology as lean
practices mature. This preparation should include assessing lean/agile practices and developing
an appropriate strategy for tools and training.
■ Anticipate continued challenges to your cultural status quo as lean/agile values become
established. Gain competency in lean/agile thinking and model the corresponding values and
behaviors.

Related Research:

"Use Agile and DevOps to Implement Lean IT and Improve Software Delivery"

"Survey Analysis: How Agile in the Enterprise Stumbles, Evolves, Then Succeeds"

Strategic Planning Assumption: By 2020, DevOps initiatives will cause 50% of enterprises to
implement continuous testing using frameworks and open-source tools.

Analysis by: Joachim Herschmann

Key Findings:

■ As agile development practices have matured and DevOps principles have gained significant
traction in enterprises, testing has become no longer a stage in a DevOps delivery, but an
integral DevOps activity that exists in various forms through all areas.

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 ■ IT organizations struggle to move from the tactical task of testing software as part of a distinct
phase or activity to a more automated form of quality assurance that essentially requires no
human intervention.
■ DevOps toolchains evolving without a plan and encompassing the entire DevOps process result
in disparate, overlapping tools that can be difficult to integrate and automate across the
different DevOps areas. Point solutions for automated testing are becoming a constraint in the
overall process.
■ Core test automation functionality is fast becoming a commodity, and vendors are increasingly
competing by adding value on top of the underlying frameworks and tools.

Market Implications:

End-user organizations and technology service and software providers are investing heavily in
tooling for DevOps delivery. The automated execution of tests as part of a continuous delivery
process is replacing the more traditional ALM-driven execution of tests. Testing is evolving to a
"bring your own tools" mentality and, rather than use a monolithic tool, developers are using a
variety of open-source and proprietary tools to perform each of these functions.

Many vendors are already showing strong support for popular test automation frameworks and
open-source tools such as Selenium, Appium, JMeter or SoapUI, and adding support for
continuous testing by enabling IT organizations to execute a set of tests specifically designed to
assess the business risks associated with a release candidate. The key to successful continuous
testing is to understand how to put together a best-of-breed quality solution that enables IT
organizations to regularly execute tests in the context of stable, productionlike test environments
and invest in building the necessary skill sets.

Recommendations:

Application leaders in end-user organizations:

■ Understand that testing will require a portfolio of tools both commercial and open source along
with the use of testing services to meet the varied needs of business.
■ Examine vendor capabilities for supporting different test automation frameworks and open-
source quality tools, and evaluate alternative solutions.

Application leaders in IT organizations:

■ Adopt a continuous quality culture that includes practices to manage technical debt and
automate tests focused on unit and API testing. It should also automate test lab operations to
provide access to productionlike environments, and enable testing of deployment through the
use of DevOps pipeline tools.
■ Shift investment bias from traditional, monolithic testing platforms toward continuous
automated testing solutions that can be seamlessly integrated into a DevOps toolchain pipeline.

Gartner, Inc. | G00316983 Page 5 of 13

 Related Research:

"The Eight Essentials When Moving to Automated Software Testing"

"Avoid Failure by Developing a Toolchain That Enables DevOps"

"Market Guide for API Testing and Service Virtualization"

Strategic Planning Assumption: By 2020, 50% of IT organizations will apply advanced analytics in
application development to improve application quality and speed of delivery.

Analysis by: Maritess Sobejana

Key Findings:

Advanced analytics is widely deployed in many areas of industry to improve business decision
making. Large to midsize organizations are moving away from "gut-feel" decision making, and
instead are using more-sophisticated analytics and fact-based decisions to project future trends
and optimize business decisions (see "Advancing Business With Advanced Analytics" and "Hype
Cycle for Business Intelligence and Analytics, 2016").

In AD, two main types of advanced analytics — predictive and prescriptive analytics (see Note 1) —
345
are gaining momentum in the marketplace, , , and Gartner anticipates that this will continue in the
next three to five years. Most of the ADLM, testing, quality and software analytics tools in use today
from leading vendors have extended capabilities beyond basic reporting and source code analysis,
into advanced analytics. They leverage current and historical data sources from AD and production,
and apply machine-learning algorithms to generate predictions of the most likely outcomes. They
recommend actions for avoiding problems, mitigating risks, or optimizing processes and
deliverables.

Examples of insights that these capabilities can derive include:

■ Visualizing heat maps or predicting emerging hotspots in the software (or code) caused by
changes, and proactively guiding testing teams to focus effort on the hotspots.
■ Giving "real" customer feedback and application performance analysis to influence delivery and
business process, and control quality more effectively.
■ Predicting defects that are likely to cause escalations in production, enabling teams to do
predictive maintenance.

Other vendors have offered advanced analytics that use data about the aspects of people who
6
create the software, and the processes by which the software is built. They provide insights on the
predicted quality in use and the ability of the team to deliver on time and within budget.

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 Market Implications:

To keep up with the business demand to deliver applications quickly, efficiently and of high quality,
IT organizations will need to accelerate the shift in focus to advanced analysis. They will need to
adopt a fact-driven analytics culture that is pushed down from the CEO and executive team to
effectively reduce waste and increase the velocity and quality of the application. This in turn will lead
to improved customer satisfaction and significant savings in time and resources. Organizations that
fail to embrace analytics will be forced through cost-optimization measures to make ad hoc cuts
that may ultimately lead to catastrophic consequences.

Advanced analytics tools in AD are already becoming more accessible, with built-in algorithms that
process huge amounts of data that is not humanly possible to analyze. In order to remain
competitive in the market, service and product vendors will need to shift focus away from basic and
traditional reporting into more innovative areas of advanced analytics. Within the next three to five
years, we expect technology to be readily available and leveraged for all areas in AD decisions.

Recommendations:

■ Use a combination of analytics capabilities at different stages of the delivery pipeline to allow
you to address a wider array of problems in your organization more effectively, and create a
culture of data-driven decision making.
■ Prepare data by identifying the problems to solve and exploring the existing data you need from
various sources to determine what might be important for advanced analytics.
■ Experiment with and invest in analytics tools that employ algorithms to mine existing data that
can be used for current and future projects.

Related Research:

"Magic Quadrant for Software Test Automation"

"Magic Quadrant for Application Development Life Cycle Management"

"Extend Your Portfolio of Analytics Capabilities"

"How to Take a First Step to Advanced Analytics"

"Extend Your Portfolio of Analytics Capabilities"

"How to Take a First Step to Advanced Analytics"

Replay Prediction
The replay prediction is a prediction from a previously published report that is so significant that it is
being republished here.

Gartner, Inc. | G00316983 Page 7 of 13

 Strategic Planning Assumption: By 2018, the transition to agile, DevOps and web-scale IT
practices will become as disruptive to IT as the adoption of lean was to manufacturing during the
1980s.

Analysis by: Nathan Wilson

Key Findings:

In the early 1980s, manufacturing was in big trouble. Most of the world's assembly plants were
based on a high-volume, large-batch mass-production model. This model required extensive
planning so that the production of all of the constituent parts of a product could be produced
months in advance. Large-material resource planning systems were being deployed to calculate
these plans. The recession of the early 1980s resulted in massive overstock of materials as demand
dropped suddenly.

A few companies led by Toyota were taking a different approach. They manufactured products in
the smallest batch possible and minimized the amount of inventory on hand. Known as "lean" and
"just-in-time manufacturing," this system broke the conventional mass-production "bigger is better"
mindset.

In 1984, a novella called "The Goal" by Dr. E. M. Goldratt was published. This book explained the
concepts of lean manufacturing and introduced the "theory of constraints" to the world. This theory
states that any flow-based system's maximum throughput is limited by the capacity of the slowest
step in the process — the constraint or bottleneck.

The combination of the recession and Goldratt's book resulted in a revolution in manufacturing
worldwide, and a complete change in conventional wisdom in manufacturing. Thirty years later, IT is
in a state similar to that of manufacturing in the 1980s. There is a crisis, brought on not by
recession, but by digital business revolution and the Nexus of Forces. The rapid change in business
needs is making the large software release unworkable. A few companies have pioneered the use of
small projects that can be delivered quickly. There is even a book, "The Phoenix Project" by G. Kim,
K. Behr and G. Spafford, which is patterned on "The Goal" and explains how the lean principles can
be applied to IT.

Market Implications:

The transition to lean IT is showing every sign of being just as disruptive to IT departments as lean
was to manufacturing during the 1980s. Most existing IT positions will be redefined or eliminated,
and a new set of roles, skills and practices will be established and necessary. The following
practices will become the primary mode for IT departments:

■ User-experience-driven requirements
■ Agile development
■ DevOps
■ Private and public platform as a service

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 Justification:

We republish this prediction from 2015 to emphasize the transformational impacts of lean on IT.

Recommendations:

■ Use a bimodal approach to learn and adapt lean IT practices.

■ Redefine roles to meet the needs of a lean IT department.
■ Focus on the lean goals of smaller batch sizes and shorter cycle times.

Related Research:

"Maverick* Research: Fire Two-Thirds of Your IT Organization"

"Enable Corporate Agility by Using Web-Scale Development Practices"

A Look Back
In response to your requests, we are taking a look back at some key predictions from previous years.
We have intentionally selected predictions from opposite ends of the scale — one where we were
wholly or largely on target, as well as one we missed.

On Target: 2014 Prediction — By 2017, JavaScript will be the most in-demand language skill in
AD.

Analysis by: Mike West and Mark Driver

While few would dispute how essential JavaScript has become to web developers since its
introduction, the term "in-demand" in the SPA above is certainly open to discussion and debate.
Perhaps "most widely used" would be a more precise term. Job boards indicate that Go is in
extremely high demand currently. JavaScript, however, is used widely, and web-based surveys of
developers (Stack Overflow, GitHub — see Evidence section) show JavaScript as the most popular
language for development.

Missed: 2012 Prediction — By 2016, 40% of AD organizations will have joint initiatives with
operations in support of continuous delivery and simplified release management.

Analysis by: Mike West

This is a near miss that appeared so likely in 2015 (see "Survey Analysis: DevOps Adoption Survey
Results") that it was presented last year as a Replay Prediction. However, the most recent Gartner
DevOps survey, conducted in the spring of 2016, found that the number of AD organizations with
DevOps in either pilot or operational mode was only 38%, and half of those were pilots.

At the same time, interest in DevOps is accelerating, largely due to the recent uptake trend in large
enterprise for both digital innovations and core business solutions. The results of another recent

Gartner, Inc. | G00316983 Page 9 of 13

 Gartner survey found a similar penetration through 2015 (37%), but also an intent to implement
DevOps by an additional 27% through 2017 (see "Survey Analysis: How Agile in the Enterprise
Stumbles, Evolves, Then Succeeds").

Acronym Key and Glossary Terms

DevOps A change in IT culture, focusing on rapid IT service delivery through the adoption of
agile, lean practices in the context of a system-oriented approach. DevOps emphasizes
people (and culture) and seeks to improve collaboration between operations and
development teams. DevOps implementations utilize technology — especially
automation tools that can leverage an increasingly programmable and dynamic
infrastructure from a life cycle perspective.

Lean/agile A deliberate synthesis of the principles of lean manufacturing with those of agile
software development. Practically, this synthesis is applied to define a software
development methodology.

Predictive Predictive analytics involves extracting an analytical model from multiple sources of data
analytics to predict future behavior or outcomes.

Prescriptive A set of analytical capabilities that specify a preferred course of action. The most
analytics common examples are optimization methods, such as linear programming; decision
analysis methods, such as influence diagrams; and predictive analytics working in
combination with rules. Prescriptive analytics differs from descriptive, diagnostic and
predictive analytics in that its output is a decision.

Gartner Recommended Reading

Some documents may not be available as part of your current Gartner subscription.

"Modernizing Application Development Primer for 2016"

"Flattening the Application Organization — Everyone Must Be Part of the Agile Value Stream"

"Cut Costs by Getting IT Lean in Lean Times"

"Principles and Practices of DevOps"

"Seven Steps to Start Your DevOps Initiative"

"Three Lean Principles for I&O Leaders to Support DevOps Adoption"

"Solution Path for Achieving Continuous Delivery With Agile and DevOps"

"Hype Cycle for DevOps, 2016"

"Making Sense of the Agile Methodology Wars"

"Market Guide for Enterprise Agile Frameworks"

Page 10 of 13 Gartner, Inc. | G00316983

 "Implementing Enterprise Agile Using the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)"

"Market Guide for Performance Testing"

"A Guidance Framework for Automating Your Front-End Web Testing Using Selenium"

"A Guidance Framework for Testing Web APIs"

"Critical Capabilities for Software Test Automation"

"Improving Website User Experience With A/B and Multivariate Testing"

"Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2016"

"Cool Vendors in Application Development, 2016"

"Choosing a JavaScript Framework"

"IT Market Clock for Programming Languages, 2016"

Evidence
1Gartner analysts handled more inquiries about lean or lean/agile through August 2016 than they
did in 2014 and 2015 combined.

2 To date Gartner has had more than 3,500 client interactions (inquiries, best-practice calls and
conference one-on-one meetings) discussing DevOps awareness, initiatives, successes and
failures.

3In a Gartner vendor survey, elements of the development of advanced analytics are evident: 62%
of vendor respondents are saying either they have advanced analytics embedded as part of their
current overall offerings or as part of their innovation initiatives planned in the next 12 months.

4Gartner analysts have attended more than 300 vendor briefings between October 2015 and
September 2016 from product and service vendors in the areas of AD (including life cycle
management), testing and quality. Advanced analytics is noted to be one of the key capabilities
offered by most of the vendors.

5Capgemini, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Sogeti, "World Quality Report, 2016-17," 8th Edition.
According to this report, predictive analytics is the most used approach to testing in an agile/
DevOps environment (45% of the respondents).

6 Seerene and Semmle are examples of such vendors.

External Data Sources

PYPL Popularity of Programming Language — This is created by analyzing how often language
tutorials are searched for on Google. The raw data comes from Google Trends.

Gartner, Inc. | G00316983 Page 11 of 13

 The TIOBE Index — A long-standing and popular programming language ranking, built by counting
hits of the most popular search engines. This index is particular interesting because it provides a
long-running historical rating for a variety of languages.

Reddit — A popular crowdsourced web news and community forum. Reddit is also the home of one
of the most active developer communities on the web. Some languages have their own specific
subreddit communities (for example, Python).

GitHub — An online hosting site for projects using the Git source code version control system. The
site is free to use for open-source projects and provides paid support for private code repositories.
It publishes a graph that shows language popularity trends on GitHub.

Programming Language Popularity Chart — This maps GitHub ranking against Stack Overflow
rankings.

GitHut — A convenient data visualization of GitHub language usage.

Stack Overflow — A popular community discussion site that focuses on questions and answers
related to a wide range of programming topics.

Powell's — We also considered trends in published book metrics. We examined the number of
published reference books with a language in the title on the Powell's under the Programming
Languages section.

Dice — We examined job postings registered here in 2016.

Black Duck Open Hub — (formerly [Link]) A comprehensive source of information for many
open-source projects. This site tracks many metrics related to open-source projects.

IEEE Spectrum, "The 2016 Top Programming Languages" — This IEEE report ranks the popularity
of several dozen languages and their typical use cases.

Debian, "The Computer Language Benchmarks Game" — This lists a wide range of benchmark
comparisons for many different programming languages.

More on This Topic

This is part of an in-depth collection of research. See the collection:

■ Predicts 2017: Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way — A Gartner Trend Insight Report

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