About

Four forces are exerting increasing pressure on the professional practice of software product development:

Generative AI
Low-Code tools
Agile contagion
Production dysfunction

Already causing visible change, these four fources will increase in strength over the coming years and the result will be a complete recasting of how software products are conceived and engineering.

Here is a glimpse of the scale of change that is coming:

Generative AI: The production all forms of digital content – including computer code – will be transformed by the addition of tooling that will allow a completely new layer of derivative content to be created while relentlessly eliminating of duplicate content;

Low-Code: The steady replacement of scripted coding with buttons, checkboxes and conversational interfaces will allow a new generation of non-programmers to build whole software products while realising productivity improvements of 100x or more, compared with what traditional software engineering teams will be able to manage;

Agile contagion: Agile no longer offers a compelling vision for the future and is incapable of adapting to the powerful forces that will recast software development in the coming years. Continued use of legacy Agile practices is now causing more harm than good. Across the globe, an ever-growing number of professionals crave something new which will carry us all into the future;

Production dysfunction: Over-optimisation for the continuous delivery of small chunks of functionality – little ‘Lego bricks’- has resulted in software engineering ending up on a local maxima where overall production efficiency is stuck at 50%. Worse, the production machines that are today used to build software products one Lego brick at a time have grown too complex for human minds to operate and are too slow and inefficient to be play a role in innovation.

Titled ‘Future Product’, the articles in this section are an attempt to incrementally map what the software product development landscape could look like in the future.