AI accelerates development processes

According to ISG's "Next-Gen Application Development and Maintenance" study, German companies are showing interest in using artificial intelligence and machine learning as they look to automate their development and maintenance processes.

Many large ADM (application development and maintenance) providers in Germany are following this automation trend, while smaller providers often struggle to keep up.

The study also shows that German companies are increasingly focusing on digital transformation and looking for ways to measure its direct impact on business results.

According to the study, many companies prefer agile development methods for new development and modernization of applications. At the same time, as the public cloud market gains momentum, companies are looking to benefit from microservices as well as serverless and low- or no-code development.

"Application development outsourcing today is no longer based on traditional waterfall approaches"

says Andrea Spiegelhoff, Partner at ISG in D-A-CH.

"Meanwhile, they include disruptive agile operating models that make the particular development model used a key competitive differentiator for many companies. Enterprises are adapting to this rapidly changing environment by developing and rolling out application capabilities faster."

German enterprise customers expect their ADM providers to have experience with agile approaches, the study adds. Nevertheless, the implementation of large agile projects remains a challenge, it said. Thus, some providers offer dedicated agile offshore services.

The study sees existing systems in particular as the biggest hurdle to agility in the company in Germany. Therefore, companies are looking for ways to remove the hurdles caused by this and are asking for consulting that integrates agile elements into all aspects of digital transformation.

The ISG study also sees an increased focus on continuous testing, with test automation in particular enabling continuous application development and DevOps. Software testing is seen as a service that can pave the way for new technologies such as blockchain and the Internet of Things.

The study also notes significant growth in DevOps in Germany, with an ever-increasing focus on security and DevSecOps.

This focus on DevOps is stimulating demand for automation tools, he said, as manual testing, building, configuring and rolling out software becomes more of a bottleneck.

As a result of the greater strategic importance of IT, more and more software products are being developed in the business departments directly or by business IT teams working in an agile manner.

Consequently, software is developed much more from the customer perspective and requirements such as stability, usability, interface openness, but also shorter release cycles become more important.

Accordingly, business departments are switching to agile process models such as DevOps, SAFe or Scrum, in which business and IT collaborate on the development of innovations and digital products. However, this requires close collaboration between business and IT.

Increasingly, the task of CIOs is to support business units in their quest for innovations, new business models and modern software solutions.

Many CIOs have already created a framework in their companies so that the business units can procure autonomous cloud components for DevOps and ADM to implement their digitization strategies.