Forecasting What is Still to Come in Tech in 2024

This question is asked by every representative of the IT sphere. Last year, we prepared an article about 5+ trends that will be relevant in 2023, and this time, we decided not to break the tradition. Developers, analysts, testers, designers, IT consultants, and HR at Usetech shared their opinions on what technology trends influenced their field in 2023 and what will be relevant in 2024.

Please note that your opinion may be different from that of our employees. And this is normal: every specialist has a different view, experience, and approach to work. So, if you have something to add, feel free to write about it in the comments. It will be interesting to look at different points of view and discuss them with colleagues.

In this article, we highlighted the key trends of 2023 in development, analytics, testing, DevOps, HR, and design, and Usetech experts talked about the forecasts for 2024, shared analytics, statistics, and a list of useful resources to keep up to date with all the news.

According to Sergey Alexandrov, IT consultant at Usetech, the technology sector is rapidly evolving, and 2024 promises to be a landmark year for innovation. As 2023 has shown, one of the key trends is the rapid growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI). McKinsey Global Institute's projections of a possible $4.4 trillion a year increase in corporate profits due to AI underscores its strategic importance. More and more companies are beginning to actively incorporate generative AI into everyday applications.

In addition, one important trend, according to Sergey, is the growth of the software as a service (SaaS) market. The Zippia report forecasts indicate its continuous increase, reaching 18% per year. At the same time, Gartner also tells us that companies' spending on software has increased to 12.9% and on data centers to 4.7%, which has become higher than forecasted.

"Next year promises a continuation of important trends. Rising costs for IT services and AI-enabled software will drive up security costs and will be a priority for companies. The increasing need for data protection will create a favorable environment for cybersecurity innovation.

The field of AI will also remain relevant. It is expected that AI adoption will start to have a significant impact on business processes, changing the approach to automation and improving business efficiency," — says Sergey. — And if you want to keep up to date with the latest technology news, it's important to follow the leading resources. International publications such as TechCrunch and Wired provide an extensive overview of technology news."

Some applications of blockchain, according to Sergey, especially in the context of cryptocurrencies, are losing relevance. Scalability issues and high power consumption raise questions about the feasibility of using this technology in some areas.

Neural networks rule the world.

Perhaps there is no person who has not heard about the development of neural networks this year. And these are not empty words: discussions about the positive and negative impact of neural networks and AI have been active in the technology community this year. For example, Forbes wrote about it, speculating on what the active development of AI and neural networks will lead to. Our colleague, Alexander Sinichkin, Head of the Development Group, notes that neural networks are penetrating everywhere and becoming indispensable assistants for humans. This is a kind of industrial resolution if you can call it that. Alexander notes the demand for neural networks next year as well.

Artificial Intelligence does not give up its position, as noted by Stanislav Bykov, Senior Developer at Usetech:

"In the field of technology and development this year, I discovered the possibilities of artificial intelligence. Of course, it has been actively developing for several years, and for me, it was somewhere "near.” But having tried its capabilities, I realize that it is a very powerful tool, which, in skillful hands, has almost limitless possibilities. I hope that not only next year but the next few years will see the continued development of artificial intelligence in many areas."

And here are the trends and forecasts highlighted by Ilya Smirnov, Head of the AI/ML Department at Usetech:

"Right now, we are witnessing a technological breakthrough in the application and updating of LLM models. Every self-respecting large corporation, from the position of a development leader, has either already created and presented its LLM model or plans to do so in the next year, 2024. At the same time, the areas of LLM implementation are already quite numerous. Companies are trying to implement LLM in support of chatbots; there are cases of implementation for generating responses to legal requests. A very good context search engine can be organized on the basis of LLM. Actually, most of the solutions, such as writing documentation and writing simple front-end solutions based on prototypes in Figma, will allow developers to spend more time on correcting texts rather than composing them from scratch.

In terms of development, I think that the strongest implementation will be at the level of autotest generation. There are already successfully implemented projects on writing simple code autotests. As a result of this symbiosis of LLM and IT specialist, developers will have more time and opportunity to write effective code or cover more complex logical functionality with tests".

Shall we talk about the DevOps sphere?

Evgeny Kiselev, Senior DevOps Engineer, notes the following:

" — Cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, GCP, and Alibaba Cloud are becoming increasingly popular among DevOps teams as they offer flexibility, scalability, and cost savings.

— Containerization tools such as Deckhouse, Docker, Kubernetes, and OpenShift continue to evolve and improve, becoming more affordable and easier to use.

— Artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are starting to be incorporated into DevOps to automate tasks, improve code quality, and optimize workflows. You could even say this year has seen a kind of "breakthrough" of this technology.

— DevSecOps, which integrates security processes into development and operations, is becoming increasingly important for application and data security.

— DevOps tools such as Jenkins, GitLab, Ansible, and Terraform continue to get better and better."

Of course, it's hard to make predictions for 2024, as something new is constantly emerging, but we can highlight a couple of points. And you can add to them in the comments:

"It is very difficult to predict, however, we can assume that the following trends in DevOps will be in demand:

— Automation of application development and deployment processes and the development of Kubernetes, Docker, Helm, and Ansible container orchestration tools - it has been and will remain.

— The use of AI and ML to optimize workflows will only get better.

— Applying the Cloud-Native concept of easy scalability and portability of applications across platforms.

— Implementing security and compliance practices (security, compliance).

— Increasing the role of DevOps culture, training, and involving a large number of employees in development processes.

— Development of tools to monitor and analyze application performance in real-time.

— Improve tools for collaboration and communication between development and operations management teams.

— Create tools for the automatic generation of documentation and reports on infrastructure status.

— Increased use of hyper-converged infrastructures (HCI) and software-defined networking (SDN)".

But there are things that lose their relevance and do not "take root" in the sphere. And Evgeny talks about it: "The approach of using exclusively automated tools for all stages of development and deployment is losing its relevance. It is not always optimal, as in some cases, manual operations can be more efficient and flexible. Rather than abandoning manual operations altogether, DevOps professionals have been looking for ways to integrate them into the development process, enabling better interaction between people and tools."

What do you think about this, DevOps professionals?

What's new in front-end?

Alexander Goncharov, Head of the Development Group at Usetech, tells us the following:

"The year 2023 in front-end can perhaps be called the year of management and architecture. Teams are getting larger, projects are getting more complex, and all this needs to be managed productively. Different methodologies and architectural approaches are increasingly used to divide teams into smaller ones by domain and beyond.

Compared to last year, more companies and products have adopted the approach of dividing monolithic applications into micro-frontends and then combining them into a whole application or combining existing applications into a meta-application so that the user has a unified experience. It is always more convenient to maintain and develop separate parts by small teams, and with this architectural approach, "conditionally painless" integration of old legacy solutions is also possible.

What will happen next year? As I said above — projects are growing and becoming more complex. I think more and more materials will appear on FSD (Feature Sliced Design), and more teams will apply this methodology on projects. It will allow code to be separated and grouped by subject area, which again makes support and development easier, as well as synchronization between teams.

I also think more and more projects will switch from Webpack to Vite and Turbopack builders. Because as projects grow, not only the cognitive load on leads and developers increases, but also the load on build systems."

Trends in mobile development

Speaking about trends in various spheres, we can't miss the mobile development sphere. That's why we turned to Anna Zharkova, Lead Developer at Usetech, and shared her comments with you:

"What's new in mobile development? I can mention the following developments:

— WWDC 2023. Smart augmented reality helmets, VisionOS. New products Swift 5.9.

This year, Apple emphasized the development of augmented reality technologies and presented its new development: a helmet running on VisionOS. Unfortunately, it will not be possible to feel the novelty until 2025. The developers also paid attention to the Swift language. Version 5.9 includes such cool features as macros for code generation and the Observation framework. It is worth noting the SwiftData framework as an analog and replacement for CoreData, interactive iOS widgets.

— KMP. Name change from KMM and release to stable.

This fall, what many developers and admirers of Kotlin Multiplatform have been waiting for happened. The technology moved to stable and became fully ready for use in Production. It means that many problems were solved: multithreading was improved last year, and this year, there were many improvements in memory handling and garbage collection. Also, one of the goals of the roadmap for next year, the development company to formulate direct interaction between Kotlin and Swift. The change of abbreviation is intended to fix the technology not only for mobile development but also for desktop and web.

— Compose Multiplatform Alfa.

A very cool and promising technology for creating a common cross-platform UI in KMP applications. The same issues as Jetpack Compose are relevant for it (state saving, performance issues, memory handling, etc.), but it also has its own cross-platform Challenges.

— ChatGPT and analogs.

Despite the fact that these technologies don't seem to be directly related to mobile development, they are actively used as tools to find solutions and generate and simplify work. The result is largely controversial, as is the fact of sharpening one's codebase in general, but nevertheless, this is becoming more and more popular.

What's new in the testing industry?

We did not bypass our colleagues from the testing sphere and asked them what they remembered this year and what trends they could highlight in their working sphere. Alexandra Novitskaya, Senior Test Engineer, tells us about new developments in the testing sphere:

"Optimization of testing processes allows to significantly reduce the routine part of work in the tasks of a tester, and the improvement of technologies and tools used allows each tester to choose and adapt his tool to the project tasks. In addition, the variety of sources of specialist development allows a tester not only to stay afloat but also to choose new vectors of development in the IT sphere".

Next year, in Alexandra's opinion, the first place will be occupied by the integration of AI and ML as tools for analyzing and automating processes and data in them. This will not only prevent errors and improve testing accuracy but also optimize development processes, making them more transparent and controllable.

Some more of the trends of the coming year will be:

— Shift-Left testing and integration with DevOps as one of the testing quality control tools to improve the interaction between development and testing teams,

As well as to accelerate development phases by automating testing processes, continuous integration, and continuous deployment pipelines.

— Security and load testing as tools to ensure reliable security and data protection and high system performance to mitigate risks when launching new services and changing the architecture of highly loaded systems.

HR trends in 2024: what to expect?

The labor market is constantly changing, and HR departments of companies must be ready to quickly adapt to new requirements and needs. Vera Petrovicheva, Team Lead Recruitment, told us what will be relevant in 2024. As you can see from the first point, AI is persistently penetrating (and to some extent, has already penetrated) the HR sphere:

"Artificial Intelligence and automation of hiring and HR processes will be one of the trends in the next year. It will reduce the time and costs of routine tasks and improve the accuracy of candidate forecasting.

Flexible forms of work, including telecommuting, freelance, and project work, remain in demand among many companies. This allows them to quickly adapt to changing market needs and attract talent from around the world.

I can't help but talk about ethics and social responsibility in HR practices. Companies will aim to create a work environment that promotes the well-being and development of their employees while also considering the impact of their activities on the environment and society as a whole.

Another thing to note is the increased importance of soft skills and personality traits in hiring and assessing staff. Companies will assess not only professional skills but also leadership skills, communication skills, adaptability, etc.

And, of course, staff training and development as a tool to retain talent and increase their productivity. Companies will invest in training their employees so that they can develop and grow with the company.

Conclusion

The year 2024 promises to be a watershed year in technology. The rise of AI and SaaS are becoming dominant trends, defining the future of business processes and innovation. However, it is important to remember that successful companies are those that adapt to change in time and skillfully use the latest technologies for their development.

Also published here.