What’s hot and what’s not revealed in latest industry report

23 October 2012 – Chicago/London/Sydney – ThoughtWorks, Inc., a global leader in custom software development, today announced the availability of its Technology Radar for October 2012. Created out of the lively debates held among ThoughtWorks’ Technology Advisory Board, comprised of senior technology leaders from across the globe, the Technology Radar provides the latest perspective on emerging trends.

The report is aimed at providing CXOs, business and IT executives with insight into the techniques, tools, languages and platforms that are driving next-generation software development from ThoughtWorks’ perspective. For each item on the radar, ThoughtWorks provides a recommendation about the use of that item by placing it into one of four classes: Adopt, Trial, Assess and Hold. The report is divided into four quadrants that cover Techniques, Platforms, Tools and Languages & Frameworks.

According to the latest report some of the strategic trends the study identifies are:

•         Mobile design and testing
•         Readily accessible analytics
•         The need for simple architectures
•         Cloud driving reproducible environments
•         Data persistence done right

Techniques - Significant shifts are taking place within mobile. As mobile increasingly becomes the primary way of accessing the internet, this needs to be factored in to new enterprise application and product strategies, through to implementation – from “mobile first” design all the way through to a new breed of testing tools.

Accessible Analytics is being driven by the explosion of interest in Big Data and analytics. But Big Data does not have to equal big budgets. A combination of open-source tooling and cloud-based infrastructure provides a more readily accessible analytics and visualisation approach.

Tools - Simple architectures continues to gain traction, including both techniques for building and composing applications, as well as infrastructure-based techniques to enable simple deployment, failover and recovery.

Reproducible environments (and the tools to support them) feature prominently in the Technology Radar and has established itself as a viable alternative in development, test and production environments.

Tools supporting the standardisation, set-up automation and co-ordinated management of development, test and production environments for both internally hosted and public cloud environments feature prominently on this edition of the radar.

Platforms - With the growing acceptance of “NoSQL” databases, the concept of Polyglot Persistence (an alternative way to store information using multiple data stores) has emerged as a viable enterprise option. Its growing acceptance is illustrated by the Neo4J platform being identified in the Adopt circle, and Riak, MongoDB, Couchbase placed in the Trial circle.

As NoSQL databases mature and gain acceptance, an understanding of the patterns for use (and abuse) become even more imperative.

Languages & Frameworks - The industry is undergoing a seismic shift in programming languages with functional hybrids, including Clojure and Scala, identified in the Adopt circle for the first time. Reaching maturity are also a number of JavaScript frameworks, including Require.js, Angular JS, Knockout and Twitter Bootstrap.

Light Table, a simple and revolutionary new way of composing code, has also been included in the Technology Radar for its potentially revolutionary approach to programming.

“There are a lot of industry buzzwords out there, and it can be hard to keep up with the latest trends and innovations in software development,” said Neal Ford, director and software architect at ThoughtWorks. “To help our customers and the industry keep apace, our Technology Advisory Board meet twice a year to debate the latest trends and share their thoughts on a host of technologies. Their conclusions and recommendations are reflected in the latest Technology Radar. At ThoughtWorks, we are proud to be at the cutting-edge of technology and business developments, and our Technology Radar helps us and our customers to focus on staying ahead of the latest trends.”

To read the ThoughtWorks Technology Radar, please click here.