Ever hear about the myth of the “seventh wave”?  Surfers use it to describe the big one — the wave that you can ride all the way into the beach. While it’s been a while since I’ve tested its premise at the shore, I often think about the seventh wave when dealing with the constant waves of tools, processes, and technology we developers face. With the constant change you face, how do you determine which technologies  will change everything from overhyped vendor pabulum (3D TV, anyone?) We don’t have the capability to invest in every new technical advance that comes down the pike, so we need to be able to tell the seventh-wave technologies from the others that might provide incremental productivity benefits or cost reduction but don’t change everything we do or think.

I’ve personally seen three seventh waves in my 20+-year development career. The first was at the start of my time as a professional developer: the client/server wave. The second was Web 1.0; I remember watching long-established ISVs struggle to adapt to the revolution that Mosaic touched off.  Now we’re a few years into another seventh wave: the shift to “mobile first” development. It’s easy to miss the structural changes when you’re in the middle of it. It’s like being a gardener  – you don’t see how quickly your crops grow when you see them every day but, if you go on an extended business trip, it seems like everything grows like crazy while you’re gone. This “step back and see the change” point was driven home to me in Ted Schadler’s latest report on 2013 Mobile Workforce Adoption Trends. In particular, this graphic jumped out at me:

I was struck that the only place where global information workers use a computer more than a tablet or a smartphone is when they are sitting in their cube or office! Then it hit me: We’ve made the transition to mobile-first. It’s in front of our eyes, but we’re not seeing it. Think about how this graphic plays out in your day-to-day activities. When you walk into a conference room, how many people are using iPads vs. Android devices vs. Windows laptops? Now that I consciously think about it, the change in the past two years is substantial, but it happened so gradually that it was almost invisible.

Now I’m a bit worried. Our latest data indicates only about 20% of developers are actively engaged in mobile projects, while our customers have moved to a mobile-first world. We’re collectively behind the crest of the wave, and I fear many of us might lose the edge and get stuck in the trough behind it. Our development organizations will not be able to keep up with what our customers and co-workers demand. As a result, we’ll be maligned as laggards, and perhaps even replaced by a new generation of modern application developers who understand what it takes to build these new systems. We’re in danger of becoming this generation’s mainframe developers — still a lot to do and with a very important set of tasks, but no longer at the edge of business innovation.

Our development shops have to start moving faster so we can catch up with the habits of our customers and co-workers. It’s in this spirit that we’ve launched our mobile application development playbook. I think it will help our clients accelerate the execution of a flexible, adaptable mobile development strategy. In particular, it’s designed to help identify and overcome:

• Development technology challenges. The No. 1 question I get asked about mobile development is “HTML 5 or native?” My answer: “It depends.” When you understand the benefits and drawbacks of native, hybrid, middleware and web-based development and how they match your customer’s engagement expectations, making a technology choice becomes a lot easier.
• Difference in development culture. Developing mobile apps is very different from the traditional systems of record your teams have been building for the past 20+ years. The technology choices are easy to make in comparison. If you’re not using Agile and dev-ops practices or continuous delivery or don’t know how to launch a minimum viable product, you’re going to struggle with mobile development.
• Integration challenges. I’ve seen a lot of clients implement a first round of mobile apps by working with a third-party design agency or regional SIs. Now these apps are evolving into connected products, and they need to tie into existing system of record and system of operation. These phase-two mobile apps are a lot more complicated, and the business can’t simply go around IT to get them built.
• Evolution in systems architecture. Many development teams try to port the tightly coupled, stateful, MVC-style apps they’ve written on big application servers into the world of omnichannel mobile clients. It doesn’t work very well. Modern applications are built differently, scale differently, and are deployed differently than many of us are used to.
• Evolving success metrics. While a “five-star app” is the ultimate measure of consumer success, there are also financial and productivity metrics that guide the evaluation of B2C and B2B mobile efforts. Understanding what to measure (and why) is an important part of the mobile shift.

Forrester’s mobile application development playbook consolidates much of the research that we’ve done in the past year, and will host significant new research and survey data in 2013 from myself, Mike Facemire, Julie Ask, Randy Heffner, Mike Gualtieri, and Margo Visitacion.

We hope you’ll find it useful.