There are newer requirements such as smarter homes, hotels, hospitals, and so on, and the crucial role and responsibility of information and communication technologies (ICT) fulfilling the varying business and people needs are growing steadily. There are a variety of noteworthy trends and transitions happening in the enigmatic ICT space these days. The prominent ones include the following:
- IT industrialization through cloud computing
- IT compartmentalization through virtualization and containerization
- IT consumerization through handhelds, wearables, mobiles, nomadic devices, and so on
- The extreme and deeper connectivity amongst all kinds of physical, electrical, mechanical, and electronic systems through the leverage of the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, cyber-physical systems (CPSs), and so on
- Cognitive IT to empower our everyday systems to be cognitive of their actions and reactions
With everything getting connected with one another, the amount of data getting generated, collected, cleansed, and crunched goes up exponentially. There are integrated platforms for big, fast, streaming, and IoT data analytics to extricate useful information and actionable insights out of data heaps. The database paradigm is going through a slew of changes and challenges.
The middleware domain is upping the ante as there are heterogeneous and multiple systems and services to be integrated and made to work together. I can go on and on. In short, both the IT and business landscapes are changing day by day. Also, businesses expect their IT service providers to be innovative, disruptive, and transformative in order to achieve more with less. As the IT budgets are being pruned by businesses across the world, the IT domain has to pick the latest advancements in order to be right and relevant to their stakeholders.
As usual, the field of software engineering is also progressing steadily with a dazzling array of noteworthy progressions. There are agile programming models for enabling the business agility. In the recent past, there have been DevOps methods germinating for guaranteeing IT agility. There are newer software infrastructure and platform solutions coming up fast in order to meet various requirements from different stakeholders. Professionals and professors are working overtime to ensure process excellence and infrastructure optimization. Strategically sound architectural paradigms and styles are being assimilated. Further on, the automation level will pick up and reach greater heights with the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) methods.
As we all know, the most powerful domain of software engineering has been accomplishing grandiose things for the business acceleration, augmentation, and automation. With the arrival and articulation of the IoT and CPS paradigms, the software field is steadily and sagaciously veering towards the much-expected people empowerment. Accordingly, there is a greater demand for software applications and services to intelligently empower not only business operations and offerings, but also to contribute to everyday decisions, deals, and deeds of individuals, innovators, and institutions. The currently available programming models, frameworks, and tools are helping us out in producing applications that fulfill functional requirements. Hereafter, the crucial challenge ahead for software professionals and practitioners is to bring forth software libraries and suites that comply with all kinds of non-functional requirements (NFRs) / Quality of Service (QoS) attributes. That is, we ought to construct applications that innately ensure various abilities, such as reliability, scalability, availability, modifiability, sustainability, security, and so on. Software patterns come in handy here. Precisely speaking, the penetration, participation, and pervasiveness of software patterns are consistently on the increase.
