As we bid farewell to 2024 and welcome 2025, it’s a perfect moment to reflect on the lessons this year has offered—both rewarding and challenging—and to prepare for the opportunities ahead. This year marked a significant milestone as I celebrated 20 years in the industry. Along this journey, I shared my experiences by publishing a book, contributing over 30 articles and whitepapers on topics like the AI-powered metaverse, IoT, D&Iand product management.

AI is transforming the software development process, but there are many misconceptions about its capabilities. This article explores the common myths surrounding AI in software development and sheds light on its reality. In recent times, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has gained momentum across various fields, especially with the introduction of Generative AI (GenAI). AI is now widely accessible, often sparking discussions about its potential, its misuse, and, unfortunately, several myths. As the hype around AI intensifies, so does the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO), leading many to adopt it without fully understanding its true value.

As we say goodbye to 2023 and welcome 2024, it’s a time to think about the good and tough parts of the year. Not everything goes the way we want, but we can learn from both the good and bad experiences. I see 2023 as a year of making things better, like fixing the base of a building. I’ve picked my top five observations on foundational changes from this year, and some might continue into 2024.

Every end is a beginning, if there is no end, then there is no beginning, just like the year 2023 can only start after the end of year 2022. So this is the right time to reflect and plan for a better beginning. A “Forward Looking Reflection” was my topic of a guest lecture at DesignersX at their year end event. We discussed challenges of software development, and how the industry is trying to solve them.

The book “Agile IT Organization Design - For digital transformation and continuous delivery” by Sriram Narayan explains software development as a design process. Following statement from the book means a lot. “Software development is a design process, and the production environment is the factory where product takes place. IT OPS work to keep the factory running..” It questions the way we traditionally think of operation support, maintenance, production bugs, rework, their costs and budgets and the focus in software development life.

I define software effectiveness as, doing the objective effectively, I mean correctly. Efficiency can be defined as, using the resources optimally where resources could be memory, CPU, time, files, connections, databases etc. From my experience, in most (should I call many) of the software projects, efficiency/performance is not much accentuated during the system design and in earlier phases(requirement and estimation) as compared to the emphasis given late in the game, coding and testing and mostly in maintenance.