It’s been nearly seven years since Marc Andreessen’s essay, “Why Software is Eating the World,” brought to light software’s role in determining the next wave of winners and losers.

Today, his essay is still relevant. The past decade saw the consumerization of IT in business. It also witnessed the shift in software consumption from desktops to the web and to mobile apps today, reflecting a mobile revolution. Software continues to eat the world, having moved to a “mobile only” development model.

This revolution is defined by disruptive companies including Airbnb, Uber and others that run with more leanness and agility compared to their 20th century counterparts. These companies have few physical assets, relying instead on software.

Since Andreessen’s essay, the software development life cycle has expanded and evolved—from waterfall to agile processes, from testing against just a handful to thousands of mobile devices and from serving a regional to a global one user base, to name a few examples. Demands for speed and quality control have been key drivers, and as a result, the life cycle moves faster than ever. A record number of developers are writing a record number of programs. This expands each and every day as businesses small and large, in markets old and new join, the mad dash to create more software, better, faster and cheaper.

Creating Software, Fixing Mistakes

Indeed, the software development curve is evolving at breakneck pace. But while the cost of creation decreases, the cost to correct a mistake increases. How can developers and their organizations stay ahead of the curve? Here are three principles we’ve observed from studying more than 25,000 customers in the last seven years:

Implement Modern Development Techniques Such As CI/CD

Continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) are two modern development practices designed to help teams release quality code faster and continuously. CI/CD has gained popularity over the past few years, and for good reason. When implemented effectively, CI/CD shortens delivery times, improves overall quality and enables teams to adapt quickly.

Key to a successful CI/CD practice and ensuring quality software development is the practice of testing throughout the development process. The cost of fixing already deployed broken software is high, and it’s crucial to ensure your software works properly on all platforms and devices to minimize customer abandonment. This is especially true when you consider that the cost of regaining a customer is four times higher than winning them in the first place. Getting software right the first time through a culture of continuous testing is critical to success.

What does ideal testing look like? It is automated, runs fast and includes good coverage. As the already broad ecosystem of operating systems, devices and platforms expands, this last point is critical. What good is your app if it doesn’t run (and, by extension, monetize) properly when it gains popularity in some part of the world with users on a different platform from the one you tested on? Developers need to ensure their software works on as many different combinations of browsers, devices and operating systems as possible, to help their business reach the maximum number of users.

Introduce ‘Self-Driving Software’ Practices, Technology into Your Development Cycle

When everyone is running so fast, it’s critical to ensure the software you’re writing actually works, won’t break your infrastructure and will actually be used by consumers. The “garbage in, garbage out” model is not an option, especially given the expense of creating software today. While the barriers to create software have lowered over time, the bar has risen in terms of creating something really remarkable.

The good news is that we are at the cusp of attaining the holy grail of software development. I have interviewed multiple engineering and quality leaders at many of our customers who are pushing the limits on ultra-efficient DevOps. Through a streamlined process (which, frankly, is nothing short of beautiful), they are able to create a single, seamless flow between development to testing to operations to deployment and monitoring—without compromising on speed or quality. The key is to prioritize speed over cost and quality and agility over all else. If an organization isn’t following this principle, they risk being left behind. In the “Stack Overflow developer survey 2017,” more than 65 percent of developers indicated that they follow some kind of agile development methodology at work.

The end result is deploying software almost immediately as soon as it’s written, for release as quickly as possible. Companies strive to achieve this scenario, and the highest performing organizations have already reached this development dream in some manner or another. Attaining CI/CD and automating all the tasks involved in creating a test system in real time is one of the arenas in which the next big software battle will be fought. The quest for the holy grail of software development is on.

Support (and Attract) Your Engineering Talent by Providing Flexibility

In  the mad dash to develop amazing software, engineering has become among the hardest roles for companies to recruit for.

Organizations need to be nimble enough to attract top engineering talent. Part of being attractive to potential hires is understanding that software can no longer be monolithic. More than ever, the talent pool expects choice in the languages, platforms and tools they can use to develop and work most efficiently. In the Stack Overflow developer survey, participants valued the languages, frameworks and other technologies they’d be working with as a critical (4/5) decision factor while assessing potential jobs. This doesn’t mean providing a “free for all” for developers to use everything and anything they want—rather, it’s all about adopting flexibility. The companies that are most attractive to the best engineers follow this principle.

Conclusion

Today, we’ve moved from software eating the world to the world eating software. Developers simply have no control or knowledge over where their website or app is going to be downloaded or accessed from. Unless it’s an internal app behind a firewall, any software developed today by definition is consumed by the global community.

Even if you test for all scenarios and devices, the future will always bring new devices, browser versions and operating systems. Your customers may use these instead of what you initially tested for. One option is to test for emerging devices in an in-house lab; however, that means committing to resources, time and qualified engineers to maintain it. In most cases, this approach is simply unsustainable.

Companies must focus on ensuring their software works both with what’s out there today and with whatever browsers, devices and platforms will be out tomorrow. This is a major challenge, requiring considerable investment. Companies need to decide whether they are in the business of testing software themselves, or leverage solutions that are.

Well before Andreessen’s seminal article, Geoffrey Moore wrote “Dealing with Darwin.” Here he he expounded upon the concept of core vs. context. Organizations will be well-served in deciding (quickly) whether building an in-house testing infrastructure is core or context to their business. The alternative is falling behind—or worse, being eaten up by the competition.

— Ritesh Arora