The InfoQ eMag: The InfoQ Trends Report 2021

Through news stories, technical articles, podcasts, and eMags, InfoQ reports on the latest innovations in software development, with a goal of providing information to allow our audience to know what major advancements to keep an eye on over the coming years. Because the software landscape continually evolves, our editors meet on an annual basis to review the current state of the industry, identify how it has changed, and highlight anything new and noteworthy.

Teams of editors, aligned with our major topic categories, discuss their individual thoughts about specific trends, and place them on the technology adoption curve.

Loosely derived from Geoffrey Moore's Book, Crossing the Chasm, this model helps to provide a rough approximation of where you would expect to see a specific technology or trend being adopted.

Innovative ideas are typically found at companies that are either defining a new space or are trying to find a competitive advantage via technology. Early adopters are the first to follow these trends, and we typically see an idea reach some level of maturity during this phase. That maturity is needed before widespread adoption occurs across the majority of organizations.

Every InfoQ editor is a software practitioner and brings their unique viewpoint and professional experience to the discussion. We also invite a select group of industry experts to join the conversation. This helps foster a more holistic view of our industry and ensures many voices are heard.

The result of all this deliberation becomes the InfoQ Trends Reports, each of which includes the topic-specific adoption curve, key takeaways, and usually some description of how the InfoQ editors arrived at their decisions.

This eMag is a compilation of the various InfoQ Trends Reports published in 2021.

While each report focuses on one topic of the current landscape of software development, when looked at together, some common themes are repeated. This gives extra weight to the current trends that are major driving forces in our industry.

For example, because these reports were written in 2021, the influence of the pandemic could not be ignored. The Culture & Methods report discusses this in-depth, but it was also a subject in Architecture & Design, as the shift to remote work has changed communication styles, and architects have had to adapt.

Also related to improving communication, A&D discussed designing for observability, while DevOps & Cloud went deeper into the state of observability practices and tooling.

We hope that by providing all these reports together, you will identify trends that are most relevant to your space, whether in one report, or appearing across multiple topics.

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