We’ve discussed the increased role and importance that applications have in our government on multiple occasions on the GovDevSecOpsHub. The fact is, software and digital services are essential in today’s government agencies and organizations. And they’re only becoming more necessary and relied-upon in the current environment – with distributed workforces and the inability to meet, collaborate or communicate in-person driving us to pursue other, digital alternatives.
Unfortunately, while we’re all well aware of the different ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted our lives – both at work and at home – we may not be as familiar with the specific impacts that the pandemic has had on application and software development teams.
According to Chris Colosimo, a product manager at Parasoft working on the company’s functional testing solutions, there are four significant ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted developers. Here are four impacts of COVID-19 that he recently shared on the Parasoft blog:
Constrained Resources
First and most importantly, resource constraints continue to rise as many workers simply cannot work from home in the same capacity they do in an office. Additionally, as many enterprises are leveraging resources from global system integrators, different geographies have established specific rules about work conditions.
Many organizations simply cannot contend with the impact, so leaders are looking for solutions to accomplish the same requirements for testing with fewer resources.
Remote Team Collaboration
Next, organizations need to think about the ways that constrained and remote teams collaborate. It’s very interesting to notice how the continued isolation has created a sense of malaise that significantly impacts teams that work remotely. This is because, for those of us that worked in an office space, it was all too easy to walk into somebody’s office and strike up a conversation about the latest release.
This level of social interaction gave us the ability to discuss our day-to-day tasks as well as air concerns about quality and process. Working in a purely remote capacity constrains those activities and puts us into a state of either total isolation, or in the case of most organizations, total distraction.
It’s challenging to discover the right ways to work with remote teams so that you can strike that balance between not enough communication and communication overkill. Having the right collaboration software, governance, and best practices help organizations thrive in the new reality.
Software Delivery Mechanics
Next, IT organizations have to radically rethink their software delivery mechanisms. “Mobile-first” starts becoming hypercritical for organizations delivering digital experiences to their customers. This is especially important because you can’t physically interact with your customers in a store. It severely impacts call centers. And digital presence now largely represents your brand.
Everything moved to a purely digital realm: from ordering food through an app, online banking, ordering and having critical pharmaceuticals delivered, and even buying clothes. Organizations need to be able to rapidly develop and deliver these experiences at speed to this changing world, so they don’t lose connection with their customers.
Attached to this challenge is the consideration organizations must make about the actual delivery mechanics. While radically rethinking and designing the digital experiences for our customers, we need to think about how we develop, test, and deliver digital content through the DevOps pipeline.
Shifting to Cloud Ecosystems & Low-Code Development Platforms
The COVID-19 pandemic pushed many organizations to modernize their delivery mechanisms by shifting their software into cloud ecosystems and low-code development platforms so that geographically separated developers and testers can collaborate and iterate to deliver the best possible experiences.
We’re seeing a rise in migrations to platforms like Salesforce, Guidewire, Mendix, and others. Not just to enable rapid delivery but to take advantage of all the capabilities inherent in those platforms for a resource-constrained organization.
On top of that, as the way software development and deployment through the CI pipeline modernizes, we’re seeing a migration to cloud platforms such as Azure DevOps, Pivotal Cloud, and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
