Tyler Jewell: 'Peak DevOps' to Drive a New Wave of Autonomous Software Development

In his 2022 Developer Landscape report, Tyler Jewell, Managing Director at Dell Technologies Capital, posits that the industry has reached a moment of “Peak DevOps,” where factors such as increasing software complexity, higher costs to build and maintain software systems, and lower developer job satisfaction will “seed a 3rd wave of software industrialization driven by Autonomous Software Development.”

As various functions across the software development lifecycle - such as coding, testing, and deployment - become increasingly automated through machine learning algorithms, Jewell predicts that - in the not too distant future - “coders working with IDEs” will become “model and machine learning artisans.”

Humans [will] shift their role from developers to directors, taking responsibility for describing system intent, managing the robotic infrastructure that builds and maintains the software, and providing the data + models needed to arm and improve the machines.

These are largely the skills and expertise embodied by data scientists today. A large majority of the 40 million professional developers that will exist in 2040 will undergo a reskilling in order to adopt and embrace these techniques. Everyone will be scrambling to revisit their undergraduate statistics classes; I know I will.

-Tyler Jewell, Dell Technologies Capital

Jewell’s report is quite expansive, covering past and current trends and providing economic forecasts across a wide range of DevOps tools and technologies. From a developer marketing perspective, here are some key sections of the report that may be of particular interest:

• The supply of developer developer talent is not meeting the demand for new digital services

• Two decades of increasing software complexity have limited developer productivity gains

• Developer Relations (DevRel) Has Emerged As An Extension Of Marketing, Support, and Product Organizations Employing 5000 To Further Enable Developer Users And Buyers.

• Fragmented Tooling, Infrastructure, and Platform Drag Productivity As Developers Spend Increasingly More Time Evaluating And Adopting Technologies Which May Not Exist In Five Years.

• DevOps Automation, Which Abstracts And Shifts Complexity, Improves Developer Productivity

Diagrams of interest from the report:

• 3 Waves of Software Supply Chain Industrialization

• Shades of DevOps Roles (“Patrick Debois of Snyk maps the roles of DevOps teams over time”)