The whole paradigm of software development is changing now. Its not just writing Code but the whole eco-system around product development is very important. Design, Development, Validation, Deployment, Security & Support are various phases that need equal attention.
Recently, I interacted with few IIIT college students and I am really happy about the questions they asked. No One asked me what code you use in your product, everyone wants to know how do we remotely access it, how secure is it, how do we scale it and how we maintain multi-tenancy etc which is very refreshing. For me, when i came out of college ( it’s almost 10 years back), software profession is all about writing code :-).
There are couple of areas that are very important and needs more focus.
Dev Ops
Dev Ops is related to below activities will more focus on deployment and maintaining SAAS platform.
Nightly builds.
Staging setups.
Product deployment.
Platform maintenance.
Scaling & Trouble shooting.
DR & Backups
Monitoring ( pro active)
Remediation ( pro active)
Technical product support
When i talk to people about support, most if them relate to BPO. Unfortunately 24×7 support became a synonym for voice based support (call center). But product support is beyond that – its about trouble shooting & fixing customer issues/concerns remotely.
Customer facing attitude become key as we move forward.
Security & Scalability
Given that everything is moving towards SAAS model, its very critical that we understand and address security & privacy concerns in the product definition.
Traditionally, Software gets shipped and people use it in their own environment. systems, But with the SAAS model, Software is accessible to you publicly and you just use it with worrying about installation & deployment . When the number of Users increase of the data increase , we need to make that the system is able to support it. This can only be achieved only if we make sure that what is developed & deployment is very efficient and scalable it starts from writing efficient code , data base queries to how we store & retrieve data with minimal overhead.
All the above is only possible if we get the basics right. We need to understand how systems work, OS behaves, software life cycle and customers use it.
As we move more into SAAS enabled services, all the above becomes critical.