As many other markets, the SQA/ALM Market soon will meet #disruption. Domains like machine learning, deep learning and cloud computing will force it to evolve in the next few years. This article is presenting some predictions about the future of the quality tools.

Disruption in Software Quality Assessment

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A new generation of Software quality tools is going to emerge. Machine Learning, Deep Learning, DevOps, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Integration, Cloud Computing, all these movements are influencing the SQA/ALM Software Editors. It has never before been so easy and cheap to produce a new static analysis tool to measure some aspects of a software. The Opensource movement and the market evolution are the direct contributors to this state. Made famous under the name of “linters”, well-known and unknown developers are creating the tools required to their activities. And the Software editors are faced to the dilemma : “Should I continue to build my own tools ? What should be my behaviour confronted with this plethoria of scanners ?”.

Until recently, Software developers were depending of the highly-specialized skills from the Quality Software Editors to detect, analyze and fix the bugs inside their softwares. And it is a big source of frustration. From both sides. Developers are usually complaining that the rules do not reflect their real needs or the complexity of their softwares. “Quality tools do not detect real problems or too late or under a trillion of false positives”. Software Editors are providing to the hungry population rule sets, standards to satisfy the crowd. A crowd much much bigger than their own forces.

I am predicting that the disruption may be coming from these directions :

• From the open-source : soon or later, the basic needs of developers will be fulfilled by the open-source offer. Tools like PMD, Findbugs, and so on have inspired a whole generation of developers. The young developers through the Angular 2, ReactJS, Go are already educated to the benefits of Quality tools. And they are heavily relying on linters well-integrated in their CI or in their IDE (Atom, Code). Twitter, Facebook are continuously producing and releasing in opensource new tools to help the developer community. The recent examples of Flow or PrePack are helping a lot developers to increase the quality of their products.
• From the digital technologies. The increasing level of maturity of the machine learning and deep-learning technologies should bring us shortly new kind of tools to predict bugs, predict code defects and usual developer decisions. I believe that the scientific researches from Microsoft and Google will contribute indirectly to the Software Quality tool market. This topic is unsurprisingly very discussed (here).
• From the software development process transformation : Movements like Agile, DevOps, Continuous Integration and Deployment, ChatBots are deeply changing the way developers are collaborating. Several aspects are changing : communication (Slack, Hipchat), software building (Jenkins, Travis CI, Microsoft TSF & Azure), software deployment (containers, PAAS, Amazon AWS)… The way a product is conceived, built and deployed requires to track and measure several quality aspects. The integration effort to produce these metrics and KPI’s is tremendous and have to be adapted to each organization. Would the developers be enough satisfied with code quality or will they require higher levels metrics extracted from their development process.

Conclusion

Who will be the future leaders in the ALM market ? Who will be the fastest to adapt to the current technology and data disruption ? Do you have some tools that could match these descriptions ?

If that article has been useful or interesting, stay connected, I will produce new articles on that subject.

One of my future article will present Codacy, an emerging code quality platform. This platform offer to ease the quality control as soon as possible in your development process to detect the bugs early and surely. I will compare this solution with the famous market leader SonarQube.