Andrew Bruce, Software Solutions Delivery Director, Expleo
This three-part blog series explores the implications of the widening global developer shortage and the role of Generative AI in re-defining the parameters of software development. I’ve also aggregated top tips from developer productivity experts on how companies can leverage AI and agile software to achieve engineering excellence and unlock efficiency gains.
Market research firm IDC has predicted a global shortage of four million software developers by 2025. Not within the next few years but within the next 12 months. Expleo’s 2023 Business Transformation Index research echoed this finding, highlighting that 94% of businesses in Ireland are suffering from IT skills shortages, making this one of the most prevalent challenges for the Irish business community.
This trend underlines the importance of companies engaging with developer productivity experts, and keeping their developers happy. It’s unreasonable to expect them to absorb the workload of multiple developers amid a chronic shortage, which comes as user expectations around frictionless in-app experiences have never been higher. Users have become accustomed to intuitive apps that are effortless to interact with – this is now an absolute prerequisite for application success in today’s highly competitive online environment
Generative AI: Redefining the role of a developer
While this widening chasm between developer supply and demand will certainly grab headlines, the mass proliferation of Generative AI looks set to redefine the role of a developer in 2024 and beyond. With the looming four million developer shortage in mind, Gartner predicts that Generative AI will account for 10% of all data produced by 2025, representing a ten-fold jump since 2021, alleviating pressure on a shrinking developer talent pool.
Across the rapidly expanding AI ecosystem, the release of ChatGPT 4.0 by OpenAI has been a transformative breakthrough in terms of democratising access to advanced AI tools, prompting talk within industry circles around AI as a tool to reduce the burden on developers, leaving human engineers time to focus on the more complex and creative aspects of their work.
The prevailing sentiment at board level is that Generative AI is a boon for developers, helping to automate repetitive coding tasks, enhance code optimisation, identify inefficiencies, and suggest improvements. I test this hypothesis and asked ChatGPT to write some code for me – a task that would normally take me an hour or so (many would be quicker – I’m a bit rusty). Lo and behold, ChatGPT provided code that built and ran in seconds. Even more impressively, when I asked it to fix a bug that I introduced, it immediately gave me an explanation of the problem and offered a solution.
However, there are some inherent problems. Firstly, I wouldn’t have understood the explanation ChatGPT gave – talk of ‘strings’, ‘arrays’ and ‘offsets’ – had I not spent quite a few years knocking out code for a living myself. Validation of the fix required an experienced human. Secondly, the code I asked it to build already exists in a tried-and-test publicly available library and so there is no need for the code ChatGPT generated. Basically, I asked a silly question and ChatGPT didn’t unaware it was silly, still provided me an answer.
Proven Methods to Boost Developer Productivity
As trusted developer productivity experts to a host of global clients, we have honed in on the best-in-class strategies that can make a tangible difference to overall productivity. Clearly AI is looking promising as a way of producing more software with less resources, but it has some way to go yet. Indeed, it may never get there – we just don’t know. Therefore, we need to keep focused on the things that have already been proven to increase developer productivity, such as:
- Maintaining a positive team culture (including improving team diversity).
- Providing best-in-class environments and tooling for our developers (including AI assistants).
- Ensuring developers have the required infrastructure to build, test and run their code. This almost certainly means intelligent use of Cloud-based architectures.
- Promoting best practice engineering approaches, using data to drive constant improvement.
There is growing awareness around the Gen-AI imperative among business leaders, with recent IBM research finding that 75% of CEOs believe that organisations with the most advanced Generative AI will have a competitive edge. IBM’s research showed that increased operational efficiency and employee productivity are the most important business outcomes that C-Suite executives are looking to achieve with Generative AI initiatives in the next year-18 months.
On the face of it, integrating AI into the developer arena looks simple, but those of us who have tried, know that it’s challenging and complex. That’s where Expleo comes in. Given our extensive experience as developer productivity experts, we take a holistic approach to help organisations across the industry spectrum navigate this journey with confidence and embrace engineering excellence. We carry out a tailored, ‘under the bonnet’ assessment of how companies are developing products, looking at existing architecture and the development team itself. We can assess the product life cycle, developer productivity, communications efficiency and resourcing efforts, while making custom recommendations to improve the productivity and quality of software development teams.
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Don’t hesitate to reach out if you’d like to chart a more scalable and efficient development trajectory for your business.
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From Hype to Reality: Navigating the AI & Hyperautomation Era
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