Trends and Challenges in Web Application Development

Last week we had the pleasure of participating in a webinar with Michael Facemire, Principal Analyst at Forrester. For those of you who attended SenchaCon, you may remember from his keynote presentation that Michael is a former developer who enjoys magic, but not when it comes to software development. Developers can’t rely on magic to overcome some of the complexities associated with their craft.

As you know, software development is an increasingly complicated endeavor. We recently commissioned Forrester to create a new study for us, The Rise of Web Technology, to better understand some of the trends and challenges faced by enterprise developers. In the webinar last week, Michael shared some of the key findings from that research.

Building the web is getting harder

More than half of the people surveyed stated that they planned to increase the sophistication of their web and mobile application user experiences. And 43% stated that the technical complexity of their web and mobile applications was going to increase.

Development costs are high

48% of survey respondents said the development phase of the lifecycle most often takes longer than planned and/or costs more than planned. The next closest competitor when it comes to cost and time overruns was testing—with just 20% of respondents selecting that option.

Web technologies are central to success

85% of the people who stated that they are successful with their web and mobile applications also said that web technologies (HTML5, CSS and JavaScript) are central to their success. The quest for improving development efficiency was the number one reason people said they were moving away from native development in favor of web tech. Quality, time, and cost factors were also cited as key factors for moving to web technology.

Recipe for success

Michael also shared his recipe for success.

1. Drive SDLC efficiency – teams need to optimize software delivery by shortening each task and minimizing delays. Composition and JavaScript are the future.
2. Teams need to modernize and deploy frequently.
3. Focus on quality – daily. Critical processes should be driven earlier into the SDLC.

Most important factors in choosing a web technology provider

Respondents said these were the most important factors in choosing a web technology provider:

1. Richness or power of the technology features: 69%
2. Overall cost of purchasing and adopting the solution: 62%
3. Quality of support: 62%
4. Availability of training, consulting, services: 55%
5. Ease of use of the solution: 50%

And that’s when Gautam Agrawal, Director of Product Management from Sencha covered the new, powerful features coming in Ext JS 6 and in our Web Application Lifecycle Management Platform. We’re looking forward to making these new capabilities available to you in our release on July 1st and providing you with the services and support to help you design, develop, deploy and manage amazing cross-platform web applications.

Listen to a replay of the webinar
Read the full report