Software developers are superheroes… let’s help them fly
Shivani Govil, EVP Ecosystems, and Emerging tech
In the media, there is often a lot of talk about how ‘the machines’ are an existential threat to our jobs and indeed humanity. For me, fear-mongering about the rise of the robots and rhetoric not dissimilar to ‘The Terminator’ storyline, is unhelpful at best, as well as being a terrible distraction from the reality and opportunity.
Let’s face it, the tech industry has disproportionate power to change the world — let’s use this power for good.
The art of the possible
Technology is here to stay, and the truth is that all emerging tech will impact some jobs, yes, but, it will more likely change what human workers do — and oftentimes, that will be for the better. Let’s look at some examples:
Before airplanes were invented, we couldn’t have imaged the job of a flight attendant.
10 years ago, most people didn’t even know what social media was, never mind that you could build a career around it.
…and likewise, if a decade ago someone told you they worked in the cloud, you might have wondered what on earth they were talking about. Cloud computing has been around in some shape or form since the early 2000s but has only become commonplace in recent years.
And we are beginning to see this phenomenon around the globe — with emerging technology creating jobs that we wouldn’t have dreamed possible even a few short years ago. A great example is the role of ‘conversation designer’ — before the rise in popularity of BOTs or digital assistants we would likely laugh at the possibility of someone being employed to ‘design conversations’ — but today this is a very much needed role, integral to the success of conversational AI ( …and not to mention, a very lucrative career choice).
The reality today
I lead a team of engineers, product managers, and programmers and if I reflect on the journey we have all been on in the past 10 years, we are really just beginning to learn the art of the possible. As well as garnering new skills, emerging technology requires us to think differently, embrace change and be visionary. My passion is to not only use AI to create great customer-ready products but to use emerging technology within software developer to enable my team to:
Make time to be creative
To build their skills
…and most importantly (as an engineer) be able to imagine the future, so we can help shape it.
AI in SDLC
In traditional software development approaches, the programmer uses a specific language to write software code to get to the desired outcome. In ML techniques, data is fed to the computer and learning algorithms are applied and iteratively fine-tuned to get to the desired outcomes.
Utilizing Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Software Development lifecycle can repurpose the role of a developer — moving them away from traditional programming to controlling and analyzing outcomes. What we’re finding is that by introducing this technology and embracing this change of mindset, in fact, increases developer productivity, rapidly and dramatically improves the time from first code to the release, and onto the actual deployment into production.
Think about the traditional development lifecycle, we have stages of analysis, design, as well as implementation, testing, deployment, and maintenance. Machine learning is allowing us to bring more data-driven driven decisions into each of these stages, enabling us to iterate towards the desired outcomes more quickly and easily than ever before.
This is sometimes talked about, and could be thought of as Software 2.0 — instead of writing direct code, the machine processes the data and fine-tunes the algorithms. Applications where this has been applied in the industry include things like image classification or language translation.
You can read more in an article I recently contributed to in DZone
The opportunity for emerging tech
Of course, this is an evolution rather than a revolution– but the results are positive, and we have seen it begin to transform both the employee and customer experience, in terms of the development process and end-user outcome.
For me, the opportunity for emerging tech really does lie within us to enabling humans and machines to work together intelligently — moving the programmer’s role on, building new skills and freeing them up to focus on what they are good at, and letting the machines deal with the mundane.
Emerging tech is bringing a fabulous opportunity for our teams, let’s help our developers to fly!
