Due to customers’ growing demand for digitalized solutions, a trend accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, many businesses underwent a digital transformation. The number of startups offering tech solutions is growing by the hour. An average of eight startups appear in the U.S. every hour, totalling some 70,000 per year. With that in mind, how can budding entrepreneurs get ahead of the development curve, make a business stand out, and ensure stable growth? 

To ensure high-quality, deep-rooted outcomes, think about long-term goals and implement solutions that will strengthen your company, balancing flexibility and the stability of solutions you invest in. Leverage the ongoing development of disruptive technologies, software development tools, robust programming languages, and scalable methodologies that influence developer teams’ productivity. 

See how you can implement these 2022 software development solutions to steer your business toward reaching its full potential.

Simplified coding with room for alteration

It’s all about marrying the technical solutions with the talent you already have within your company, as team members bring a unique understanding of your business’s core mission and values. But that’s not all of it. It's a common goal across the board to make your employees' lives easier without compromising the company's performance. 

With that in mind, the implementation of modern coding tools, such as GitHub Copilot, plays a significant role in company development. Those platforms are built on public datasets and open A.I. systems that serve as a personal coding editor, taking away many of the traditional software development pain points. This ensures more accessible and approachable coding solutions.  

Your team can also rely on A.I.-generated predictive analysis based on the initial input, bringing work ease and faster flow. Use widely available coding assistance tools, such as Tabnine, that will enhance your team’s work by allowing A.I. to anticipate your programming needs and offering all-language code completion. 

The truth is your business will grow, and alongside growth, you'll see the increased complexity throughout all departments. You'll need to upgrade your strategy, which will most likely result in adapting your software to new needs and requirements. If you're looking to jump on the trend, know that many platforms might lure you with an all-in-one solution, pledging to do all the coding for you. Don't let the promise of “work being done by itself” overshadow the prospect of long-term goals. 

If you don't know how the code is written, you will not know how to implement the necessary changes to keep your business up to speed—a common side effect of leveraging no-code and low-code platforms without a full idea of how they work. Forget tools that leave you in the dark; instead, rely on setups that ensure coding transparency and clear guidance to save your business from sinking in extra expenses. 

Beware the technical debt: When streamlining your company's performance, the lack of understanding when investing in quality tools could be costly. Do the legwork and analyze the different options instead of being short-sighted and rushing to choose the first available solution.

Ever-growing technologies to boost your software development process 

Automation, A.I.-driven solutions, and other technologies that boost software development efficiency are recurring topics that generate constant excitement. These constantly improving technologies provide you with a simple way to make your business thrive without investing too much of one of your most valuable resources—time. 

Optimizing your processes results in cost-effectiveness, which is the underlying goal of every company. Take Pulumi, an Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) platform that enables you to continuously advance your coding by creating and deploying cloud software on any cloud that uses containers, serverless functions, and hosted services. An integrated solution such as this one will bring ease and clarity to all your software-development processes. 

With platforms such as New Relic or Splunk, you’ll ensure faster failure detection and in-depth time recovery monitoring for your operations. This will lead to increased release rates and customer satisfaction. With light-speed bug fixing and implementing new features, you’ll set your strong market position as a reliable and trustworthy business. 

Real-time performance tracking for process improvements

Performance-tracking tools continue to improve every year, adding new features and enhancing your team’s performance. Identifying malfunctions and bottlenecks in your team’s performance will save you resources. However, to ensure optimal resource allocation for engineering teams, companies should look at modern KPI-tracking tools:

Code Climate: Keeping teams’ workflow right on track, optimizing their performance by monitoring the advance on each task and categorizing it based on error occurrence probability. 

Haystack: Steering your teams’ skills towards reaching their full potential, providing employees with real-time feedback, identifying their bottlenecks, and preventing burnout through early problem recognition and taking action.

GitPrime: Providing real-time project insights and team metrics with no manual updates or developer’s work interruptions. GitPrime contains two main report-delivering features that measure engineer performance based on three core metrics (Code, Review, and Submit Fundamentals) and compares the contributor to other engineers in the organization, providing recommendations based on individual assessment. 

Those tracking performance tools will help you achieve maximized efficiency and ensure you’re working to reach one of Gartner’s 2022 trending software approaches: the total experience. This is a business strategy that integrates employees, customers, and users’ experience across multiple touchpoints to accelerate growth. 

Quality opposed to quantity in team building

Relying on the quality of your team’s skillsets is a necessity you can’t possibly put a price on. That's why it deserves a spotlight in the upcoming year’s trends list. To ensure the best performance within the team, merely implementing technology will not be enough. You need to focus on building a high-quality team from the very beginning. What does that mean?

Surround yourself with people with high-density talent and build a team filled with high performers to ensure your company won’t crumble under the modern dynamic and constantly developing market. This will be the key to success in 2022. That’s the approach Netflix implemented in their business strategy and saw great success: Its primary assumption is that every company has an inherent will to grow, but with expansion comes greater complexity, often resulting in a smaller number of high-performance workers. 

Fill your ranks with trustworthy, ambitious, self-disciplined people, and don’t push your company towards rigid, resistant-to-change rules. Once your team has already strengthened its skill-set, create a strong sense of belonging and loyalty to secure two aspects:

• Ensure that, if your company experiences a drawback, employees won’t simply switch to competitors. As a CEO, you want to be confident that the people you’re investing in will stay with you no matter the company’s economic fluctuations. 
• Secure the company’s processes, sensitive data, and project details. An employee going rogue and selling your data to a higher bidder would negatively influence your current work. 

2022 will be all about building solid yet flexible foundations for your business’s growth. Keep in mind that one solution will not be enough.  A holistic and unified management system will drive greater confidence, loyalty, and advocacy. Work towards well-balanced and efficient solutions, but don’t prioritize speedy delivery over high-quality code—you’ll thank yourself later when the time for change comes.

Guillermo Perez is CEO and Co-Founder of Octobot.