Application development workloads keep growing, but developer teams are not. If anything, development skills are increasingly in precious short supply.
That's the word from the latest survey[1] of 3,300 IT leaders, conducted by OutSystems. The development skills shortage has been a crisis raging for a number of years now, and this latest survey shows no sign of abating.
Fueling the demand is the rising tide of digital transformation, and with it, the reliance of business leaders on technology to amp up the customer experience and compete on data analytics. The number of applications respondents have slated for delivery in 2019 is 60% higher than in last year's survey. A majority, 65%, said they had plans to deliver 10 or more applications, 38% plan to deliver 25 or more apps, and 15% said they plan to deliver 100 or more apps in 2019.
While demand for applications is up, development teams are not growing to meet the demand. Only 36% of the organizations in the survey have larger application development teams than a year ago.
Still, development teams are getting better at getting applications designed, built, tested and out the door. A majority of IT managers, 61%, report that it takes four months or less to deliver an application -- up from 54% a year ago. However, backlogs remain stubbornly long. Close to two-thirds of IT professionals, 64%, say they have an app dev backlog, and for 19% of these respondents, the backlog was more than 10 apps. Only 39% said their app dev backlog had improved in the last year, and 50% say it's about the same..
Finding enough people to cut through these backlogs to build and deliver these applications has grown even more difficult. Only 15%