Please note that this blog is archived and outdated. For the most current information click here!

Innovation News: Software Bots Are Changing the Software Development Process

We all love the ability of Agile development to deliver better software systems cheaper and faster. By now, most businesses have seen the benefits of the Agile methodology and converted away from older top-down methods.

The core principle of Agile is start simple and iterate, iterate, iterate. This process is complemented by the new software bots that are being developed.

In the past, each iteration in the Agile methodology was a cycle of the same processes. This split software engineering into three repeated activities: business analysis, developing and testing. In the business analysis phase, you scope the market and plan designs. The development process is about modelling and building your product. Testing involves looking for bugs and improving what you have developed. All businesses vary, but these are approximately equal parts of the software development process.

Now we have the introduction of the game-changing software bots. These completely revolutionise the software development process. At WorkingMouse, we use the Codebots platform. This ecosystem of code writing software bots supercharges the development process. On average, 90% of our partner's software is written by Codebots. The result of this is a massive reduction in time spent developing and testing. This increase in productivity transfers to real cost-savings.

However, while software bots are reshaping the role humans play in software engineering, the business analysis activity is still performed by humans. In fact, this will always be the case because innovation is an innately human characteristic. This means that while software bots will greatly increase the efficiency of software engineering, humans will always remain a significant part of the process.

Traditionally, analysis and designers create many documents and diagrams during the business analysis phase to explain to the developers and tests what needs to be built and how it should work. It's these documents and diagrams that the software bots can then use to create most of the code. This is called model driven engineering.

In the end, although software bots will change the way we develop software, they are still building on and improving the Agile methodology. Improving Agile development means an even more efficient business and ultimately, significant cost savings.