Generative AI and the software development life cycle: an IT leader’s guide

AI coding assistants have gone mainstream, and organizations worldwide are adopting these tools to supercharge the productivity and innovation of the development teams building and maintaining their digital infrastructure. From the summer of 2023 to the summer of 2024, 90% of developers used a coding assistant to help them develop production-grade digital solutions, according to IDC’s September 2024U.S. Generative AI Developer Survey.

Now that developers have moved beyond experimentation and integrated these tools into their workflows, they have a much better sense of what they need from an AI coding assistant, and they are evaluating the available tools from the perspective of experience. According to IDC’s research, developers want coding assistants to integrate with their existing toolsets and to produce high-quality results with equally high levels of security, privacy, and data protection. Given the current state of the art, achieving these results requires an AI coding assistant with options for customization based on the organization’s code, documentation, and best practices.

With recent improvements in the underlying foundation models, IDC predicts that by 2027,AI will be capable of automatically generating code to meet functional business requirements for 80% of new digital solutions in development and early deployment. During the next three years, developers will increasingly interact with a team of AI assistants, making it easier for less experienced developers to get up and running and for more experienced developers to focus on more challenging tasks, including incorporating intelligent features into their digital solutions.

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