As we do yearly, we’ve heard from people across the software program improvement trade who share their ideas on which areas will thrive and which could not survive in 2025 and past. Listed here are a few of their predictions for subsequent yr.
Derek Holt, CEO of Digital.ai
Whereas Worth Stream Administration continued to lose steam in 2024, we additionally noticed the quick emergence of Software program Engineering Intelligence (SEI) to take its place. SEI could have a breakout yr in 2025 as an increasing number of companies notice they should measure the end-to-end enterprise means of software program improvement and supply so as to drive steady enchancment, really ship improved developer experiences and finally notice the potential good points for an AI-powered Software program Growth and Supply capabilities. SEI is the important thing to every.
Emily Nakashima, VP of engineering at Honeycomb
Whereas the present AI hype exhibits no indicators of slowing, a lot of the main focus in 2024 was on AI code authorship slightly than code possession. Companies finally spend way more time proudly owning, sustaining, and working software program than authoring it. The present era of AI instruments has proven it may be inconsistently helpful within the upkeep and possession drawback area. As such, 2025 will convey heightened consciousness of the downsides of proudly owning AI-generated code and operating LLMs in manufacturing — what was quick to create in improvement is all of a sudden sluggish, costly, and unpredictable in manufacturing. I’ll be searching for advances in greatest practices for LLM observability and count on we’ll see headline-making safety incidents as a result of LLM-generated code.
Dylan Thomas, senior director of product engineering at OpenText Cybersecurity
In 2025, DevSecOps will proceed evolving past the ‘shift-left’ paradigm, embracing a extra mature ‘shift in every single place’ method. This shift calls on organizations to use the proper instruments on the proper levels of the DevSecOps cycle, enhancing effectivity and effectiveness in safety practices. Light-weight evaluation in IDEs will assist builders catch points early, whereas automation built-in into pull requests and CI/CD pipelines will guarantee a cohesive ‘combine as soon as’ method for core capabilities reminiscent of SAST, SCA, and more and more DAST, notably for API safety testing.
Jans Aasman, CEO of Franz Inc.
As digital currencies develop, the sophistication of fraud, together with cash laundering and phishing would require extra superior detection strategies. Rising types of AI, reminiscent of Neuro-Symbolic AI (NSAI) will mix sample recognition, logical reasoning, and language understanding to determine suspicious transactions throughout decentralized platforms. By analyzing blockchain information, sensible contracts, and transaction histories, NSAI will uncover hidden patterns of fraud, interpret the intent behind transactions, and distinguish official trades from illicit actions like market manipulation. The distinctive talents of NSAI will have the ability to flag high-risk transactions whereas offering clear, explainable causes for the flags, serving to regulators and trade gamers keep transparency and compliance.
Alex Merced, Senior Tech Evangelist, Dremio
The competitors to dominate the information catalog area will change into a high-stakes showdown. As hybrid and multi-cloud ecosystems develop, organizations will demand seamless interoperability, driving fierce innovation in governance, lineage, and user-defined capabilities (UDFs). Apache Iceberg will emerge as a key participant, redefining requirements for open desk codecs with its hybrid catalog capabilities. This race gained’t simply reshape information structure—it’s going to resolve who controls the way forward for information portability.
Jamil Valliani, head of AI product at Atlassian
2025 would be the yr of the AI agent. As brokers develop richer in interactivity and begin to attain throughout extra than simply textual content and into audio and visible parts, they are going to convey a few highly effective cultural shift in how people collaborate with AI. Brokers are already fairly good at augmenting and accelerating our work — within the subsequent yr, they are going to get even higher at performing extremely particular duties, taking specialised actions, and integrating throughout merchandise, all with people within the loop. I’m most excited to see brokers turning into exponentially extra subtle in how they’ll collaborate with groups to deal with complicated duties. Our relationship with them will evolve, and we’ll see new types of collaboration and communication on groups develop.”
Lucy Beaumont, expertise administration answer lead at SHL
In 2025, main corporations will more and more view their workforce as a neighborhood of abilities slightly than as static job roles. This angle permits organizations to harness and deploy abilities fluidly, assembly dynamic enterprise wants whereas supporting worker progress. To do that, organizations might want to create skill-based ecosystems the place expertise will be matched with alternatives seamlessly.
Christopher Robinson, chief safety architect at OpenSSF
AI will more and more assist coders, defenders, and attackers speed up their work. By integrating AI with automated tooling and CI/CD pipelines, builders will have the ability to rapidly determine and repair coding flaws. Defenders can leverage AI’s capacity to investigate large quantities of information and determine patterns, accelerating the work of SOC groups and different blue-team operations. Sadly, attackers may use AI to craft subtle social engineering assaults, evaluation public code for vulnerabilities, and make use of different techniques that can complicate cybersecurity within the close to future. We have to discover ways to safe AI earlier than broadly deploying it for safety functions.
Sachin Aggarwal, co-founder and CEO of StackGen
In 2024, 52% of builders who responded to Stacked Up: The IaC Maturity Report shared that they spend greater than 20% of their time on Infrastructure as Code (IaC). In 2025, IaC instruments will evolve to generate infrastructure from code slightly than counting on builders and infrastructure groups to study new instruments and programming languages. These instruments will apply safety and governance necessities by default, growing the time builders can spend on writing utility code that delivers enterprise differentiation slightly than losing time struggling to put in writing IaC.
Roshan Kindred, chief variety officer at PagerDuty
Tech organizations, with their world workforces and buyer bases, should develop and implement inclusive IDE methods that reach past Western-centric views. This implies designing localized initiatives tailor-made to the distinctive cultural and regional wants of staff to foster true world belonging. Supporting worker well-being would require regional and cultural alignment to deal with the various challenges the world will face over the subsequent 4 years. Creating a worldwide understanding of variety should change into a core management competency.
Arnab Sen, VP of information engineering at Tredence
Decentralization of information possession with information mesh structure will change into extra prevalent, permitting groups to handle their very own information as merchandise. This shall be notably useful for big organizations looking for unbiased, high-quality information change.
David A. Wheeler, director of open supply provide chain safety at OpenSSF
Many software program vulnerabilities will be eradicated through the use of programming languages which are memory-safe by default. Nevertheless, it’s impractical to rewrite all current software program in C and C++, which aren’t memory-safe by default. I count on to see gradual rewrites of small C and C++ modules, together with extra use of them. There can even be longer-term efforts in 2025 which will pan out later. Some are investigating utilizing AI to economically translate C and C++ to a memory-safe language. There’s additionally work to develop a memory-safe variant of C++. These longer-term efforts gained’t be prepared for manufacturing use in 2025, however they may give us long-term alternate options.
Tricia Gee, lead developer advocate at Gradle
Flaky checks will proceed to be a outstanding challenge for dev groups in 2025, particularly as extra corporations proceed to undertake microservices. It’s because groups might want to do integration testing between microservices, that are inherently flaky. Will probably be important for dev groups to prioritize figuring out and fixing flaky checks earlier than they trigger toil and frustration for builders, and compromise the standard of delivered software program.