Software is the essential enabler for the new economy and science. It creates new markets and new directions for a more reliable.
There has been a major trend away from custom designed programs develop by the professional programmers of the organization. Instead, the trend is toward the use of off-the-shelf software packages acquired by end users from software vendors.
Many new development tools and languages heave emerged to enable more simplified software development or to meet the software requirements of new environment.
The trend dramatically increased with the development of relatively inexpensive and easy to use application software package and multipurpose software suites for microcomputer.
It is often more cost effective to buy software rather than develop it from the ground up.
The trend has accelerated, as software package are designed with Web-enabled networking capabilities and collaboration features that optimize their usefulness for end users and workgroups on the internet and corporate intranets and extranets.
Also many software packages can now be downloaded, update, managed, and rented or leased from software companies or application service providers over the internet and corporate intranets.
Other software packages use capabilities called intelligent agents to perform activities based in instructions from a user. For example, some electronic mail packages can use an intelligent agent capability to organize, send, and screen E-mail messages.
These major trends seem to be converging to produce a fifth generation of powerful, multipurpose, expert-assisted and web-enabled software packages with natural language and graphical interfaces to support the productivity and collaboration of both end users and IS professionals.
Over the last seven to eight years, new tools and practices have emerged which emphasize the social nature of computer mediated interactions. Commonly labeled as social software and social media, they encompassed applications such as blogs and microblogs, wikis, social networking sites real time chat system and collaborative classifications systems.
Three or four years ago, there was a trend in software certification, driven in some cases by public’s dissatisfaction with the frailty of software based system.
Online banking and trading systems have experience failures and that were widely publicized and have cause wide-spread chaos. Security breaches in software systems have disrupted people’s lives,. There is no reason that software system should no bet certified as fit for use and safe.
New technology emerged with computing is being transferred by a new model, cloud computing. In this model data and computation are operated somewhere in a ‘cloud’ owned and maintained by a third party. Cloud computing is the hardware systems software, and application delivered as services over the internet.
Software development and trends
