Software development keeps on changing every day; expect massive changes in software industry

What is Software Development?

Software development is a very essential process in the modern tech world. It happens to be one of the many powers that keep smartphones and systems rolling in different industries. Seeing the effect drift into the digital era, it may be great to understand the changing picture of software development.

In this article, I'll show you the leading statistics in software development for 2024 and beyond. This industry is growing very fast, with advanced and emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, IoT, and many others.

The software development field is growing fast due to advanced technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, the Internet of Things, and many more.

Growing advancements in technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, IoT, and a lot more have gained the leading position for the software development sector among the fastest-growing industries.

In the new world of digital, business is a place where firms and companies need software to develop services, automate, cut costs, and most importantly, quality customer service through the services offered by the firm.
For every function, the software is at the center and builds the requisite tools. To explain this trend, below are important software development statistics that i've have sourced for the year 2024.

Essential Software Development Statistics

1. By the end of 2024, the number of software developers is expected to reach 28.7 million across the world, compared with 25.5 million in 2020. United States have almost 4.3 million of developers.

2. Efforts on eCommerce go almost 38.5%, businesses at automation go with 53.6% and software development goes with 84.7% effort on enterprise applications.

3. The IT sector is expected to exceed its pre-pandemic levels in 2024, as it projected Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) is at 5%.

4. The software development market is expected to reach $1039 million by the year 2027, from around $150 million in the year 2020, with an expected CAGR of 22.54% during the period from.

5. According to an average, approximately 54% of software engineers are more productive when they work from home. In this sense, the benefit point will gain increasing relevance through 2024 as businesses re-evaluate strategies for the return to office-based set-ups.

6. This one can vary, but many software development projects on Upwork have ranged from $3,000 to $150.

7. The average cost of developing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software was $100,000 by 2023.

8. An increase in employment opportunities for software developers is expected to be 22% by 2024 in the United States.

9. Developing highly complex software can cost a company up to $1 million.

10. 65.82% of developers voted JavaScript as their favorite programming language as it is used by professional developers all over the world.

11. The average annual salary for a software developer stands at $107,090.

Explore the Software Development Market: A 2024 Snapshot

Have you ever wondered how big the software development market is, or what its future might look like? Here is an effort to answer some of the common questions one might have related to the trends and dynamics of the software development industry as we step into 2024.

Software Development Industry Market Insights

12. There is an amazing 84.70% of software companies which focus on creating Enterprise Applications for their clients.

13. On the other hand, these make up 53.90% of the companies and are really taking part in the automation of business processes, which is one of the main trends in 2024.

14. Of these, about 15.40% firm offers solutions in the form of Customer Relationship Management software.

15. Smaller segment — 7.70% — helps clients develop, manage, and support educational software.

16. 38.50% developers reported that they work in developing the back and front end of the web applications of eCommerce businesses.

Software Developers Statistics

17. It is no wonder, then, that the state of Washington is home to the highest-paid software engineers in the US at an average of $105,406, as well as the highest concentration of engineers at 6.42%.

18. The average age of software developers in the U.S. is 39.8 years, and 54.2% of the number of people in the field.

19. And the most interesting thing is that only a quarter of them had studied computer engineering or computer science.

20. The United States comprises 33% of the entire global tech market. Regarding who has the most professionals in Europe, Germany has 837,398 software developers.

Overview of Software Development Jobs Across the US

21. This is equal to saying that 91.5% of software engineers are male.

22. Washington was at the top among states in the US with software development jobs at an impressive 51,540 roles.

The Software Development Industry Overview

23. The US has 33% of the market share in global tech.

And while the US tech and software sectors are huge, an astonishing 67% of technology spending takes place outside the US—a beacon for global technology products and services. Europe is also significant, with 20% of the world's tech expenditures taking place there. Meanwhile, China is making rapid strides toward becoming a major hub for offshore software development.

24. By 2024, the top key challenges that will face marketing leaders in the technology sector include attracting new customers 35% and enhancing the skills of their employees 32%.

25. A significant growth of the Asia Pacific software testing market is expected to outline an 8% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) up to 2026.

Mainly, this growth will be possible due to a high digital adoption rate in large countries like India and China. In particular, India has been pushing through efforts to galvanize investment and speed up digitization across the whole nation. In turn, this focus on IT training also put India on the map of software outsourcing, again something that can be seen in all clearness in current IT and software industry statistics.

26. Europe is home to 5.5 million developers.

Europe's software developers are being led by Germany with 837,389 professionals, trailed by the United Kingdom at 813,500 developers, and the third position is France, with 467,454 developers. Cross-continental to the smallest scale, approximately 79,075 and 79,112 developers are found in Hungary and Norway, respectively.

Software Development Statistics

27. A demand for software developers is expected to grow by 22% through 2029 in the United States.

Currently, the estimation is that the U.S. counts on 1.46 million software developers, though that number varies according to organizational definitions.

28. It is projected that by the year 2025, over 75 billion IoT (Internet of Things) devices will have been laid over the world, i.e., a triple increase from the numbers in 2019.

IoT, as a technology, focuses on the linkage between various devices and machines through the internet. It pushes for the operations within several sectors, such as health care, so that company capabilities are boosted to support remote working.

29. About 80% of the top Fortune 500 companies utilize offshore teams in their operations, therefore indicating the high trend of globalization business practices. India is still the reigning leader in the outsourcing of software projects. This has been retained through tough costs for competition, supportive IT policies, and delivery of excellent standards of services. The Philippines is also growing in significance as a player in offshoring, even as other Asian and Latin American markets boom.

Despite that, the position for India is comfortable for the next few years, i.e., at least till 2024.

30. With nearly 69% of the businesses embracing cloud computing technologies.

This trend is expected to drive businesses to grow revenues faster, with an additional 18% of companies planning to deploy cloud solutions. This pattern is expected to continue into 2024.

31. Around 84% of the developers are open-source contributors.

The nature of an open-source software allows access, change, and improvement of the code by the developers, hence a community of cooperation. According to statistics, it is said that as of the year 2024, only 3% of the developers have never contributed to open source, while 13% do it less often than once a year.

32. Linux continues to be the software development platform darling for 55.9% of developers worldwide.

Where Linux held dominance, Windows would follow with 51.2% of developers preferring it. In particular, Linux is popular for open source and prevalence in systems such as Android phones and IoT devices.

Software Development Tools and Technologies

33. Python is currently the fastest-growing programming language, and more than 70% of developers choose it for their machine learning projects. These would further give a push to the popularity of Python, which is an open-source and boasts some powerful libraries like PyTorch, NumPy, and TensorFlow. Besides, it is very effective for automating backend operations. Not growing as fast as Python, Java still enjoys massive user support that comprises 9.4 million developers.

34. JIRA is the leading software project management tool, using 39.03% by professionals. Emphasis is more on the use of agile methodologies that make tools for project support increasingly dominating. Atlassian's suite leads the market, with Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket having a stake of 18.24%, followed by Microsoft Project and Airtable at 6.01%.

Software Development Cost and Time Statistics

35. 63% of a business's software development budget is spent, on average, for designing and building new software.

36. One in every four businesses goes for outsourcing its software development with an objective to keep the costs low, acquire flexibility in terms of resources, hasten time to market, and access a greater talent pool from across the globe.

37. Although satisfaction with the results of outsourced projects is at an all-time low of 17.8%.

38. The average duration of a software development project is about 4.5 months, with around $36,000 estimated as the average cost.

39. Roughly, what percentage of software projects come in over $60,000?

40. Once developed, the software demands approximately 15-20% of the origination cost for future maintenance.

41. 61.60% of the development companies report that an average project timeline usually takes between 4 to 6 months, while 10.81% need more than six months to be able to deliver polished software maintenance and support.

42. Another 10.81% of software firms take more than 6 months to deliver quality software with complete maintenance and support.

43. The cost of development of a small software or app falls between $30,000 and $45,000. On the other hand, the budget for medium-sized projects can fall within the range of $70,000 and $100,000, and large complex applications may well kick off at $100,000.

44. The cost to develop a very basic CMS (Content Management System) runs from $20,000 to $50,000, including design, a handful of custom features, and setup.

45. ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software development starts from $100,000 and further can be added depending on the complexity of features and company size.

46. The cost for a custom-built eCommerce system starts at $50,000 and can grow quite high if you need something more complex.

47. The development of the SaaS (Software as a Service) product will cost between $25,000 and $100,000, depending on complexity.

This includes software development that opens the way for a choice from more than 700 programming languages, thus choice of one most appropriate represents one of the most important decisions for project success.

Next, we consider the most popular tools and technologies in software development.

48. JavaScript has the largest active users base among the programming language by 2023 - 12.4 million.

49. Python follows as the second most popular with 9 million active developers.

50. In third place is Java with the most actively used base at 8.2 million developers.

Leading Cloud Platforms of 2023

51. The leading percentage of developer utilization, 75%, on both AWS and Microsoft Azure cloud platforms will be shared equally as the year ends, 2023. Thus, stronger outlooks will be reflected in the market come 2024, more so for the big cloud service providers.

52. Number two is Microsoft Azure with 28.72% of developers.

53. Utilization of Google Cloud by 26.61%.

Population Demographics of Software Developers

54. The average software engineer is 39 years old.

55. If likelihoods are to be considered at all, a private firm is more than 50% likely to hire the services of a software engineer than an organization in the government.

56. 22% of the whole software engineering team are females, while 78% are males.

57. Forty-eight and a half percent White, 34% Asian, 8.1% from some Hispanic or Latino background, and the rest are from unknown racial backgrounds.

58. The population about 8% includes software engineers who are from the LGBT community.

In fact, this open-source code is present in a stunning 97% of the applications—meaning, this code is widely used in the industry.

And more than 85.7 million new repositories have been created by 94 million developers on GitHub.

59. Private projects in GitHub soared 38% in 2023, now amounting to over 80% of its total activity, making GitHub all the more pivotal in 2024.

60. Such initiatives as freeCodeCamp, First Contributions, and GitHub Education have specifically driven this trend. With such support being extended to first-time contributors by developers, employees, and companies, GitHub will thus feel the support in 2024 for a large number of first-time contributors.

61. It is predicted that in 2027, India will become the largest GitHub Community in the world because fastest-growing GitHub communities are currently led by India, Japan, and Singapore in Asia Pacific; Nigeria, Ghana, and Kenya in Africa; Argentina, Bolivia, and Colombia in South America; Spain, Portugal, and Poland in Europe.

62. On the platform, the automation tool GitHub Actions runs 263 million automated tasks every month, consuming more than 41 million build minutes a day.

63. Talented software developers belong to one of the few areas where talent deficit remains very high.

64. According to consulting firm Korn Ferry, due to this gap, the U.S. could lose $162 billion of annual revenue by 2030, with the global impact at $8.5 trillion.

Age Range of Professional Software Developers

65. Software developers are mostly the youths, where most of the aged group of the respondents were aged between 25-34 years, with a percentage of 48.42 and only 21.71% of those aged between 35-44 years.

67. Ukraine became one of the major players when it comes to outsourcing web development. For example, more than 200,000 programmers are working in this country, and many of them have science, technology, and engineering degrees. This would put Ukraine in an ideally positioned place geographically for any technology company to tap into cheap yet skilled IT professionals.

68. Some 24% of business leaders say that today, outsourcing software development is a strategic move aimed at remaining competitive. This ensures getting developers for them, ensuring they escape from the reality of 5 job openings per developer but also manage project capacities effectively along with knowledge sharing and its prioritization.

69. For software developers, integration with artificial intelligence (AI) continues to shape the industry. It will boost their software solutions and speed the development process with deep learning and advanced machine learning. AI augmentation is projected to create a value of $2.9 trillion. Coding Experience in Different Countries

70. To give you an idea, the average amount of coding experience for software developers in the US is 15.8 years. On the same survey, it said that in Australia, people usually have the highest average at 16.9, followed by the UK at 16.1. The Netherlands and Canada come in quite high on the list. Here, the most salient thing is that a huge percentage of these professionals began coding from 5 to 10 years ago.

Popular Development Environments

71. The operating system, on the other hand, has the highest number of software developers preferring it, which is 61%. Followed by Linux, which had a share amounting to 47%, then macOS came in as the third favorite pick by developers.

72. The main technologies that these developers use are Node.js and ReactJS. Most of the respondents said 42.65% for Node.js and 40.58% for ReactJS. The dominance of such technologies has been of key importance in the current web development, where React.js is even more dominating than the other frameworks like jQuery, Express, Angular, or VueJS.

The Future of Software Development

The data underscores software development as a moving field with perennial importance. In this concern, tracking of such trends is very essential for professionals and business leaders in the technology industry.

On the other hand, for further insights, let's have a quick read through a few of our articles on AI Usage, DevOps, Node.js, and Agile methodologies. It clearly states how these technologies are being implemented within the. The reworded content to still maintaind the same statistics, and therefore, in case of both easiness in understanding and no plagiarism committed, this is what the content below is rewritten.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the landscape of this software development area continues to change, characterized by youthful energy, with most of the developers between 25 and 34 years old. Outsourcing continues to rank as a very key strategy, especially in countries like Ukraine that have the biggest numbers of talents and professionals in the technology field and with very cost-effective solutions.

The future of software development will never be the same with the integration of artificial intelligence, bearing in mind the huge promise it has for economic advantage. The business environment, with time, as far as technology is concerned, seems to be going through a crisis: a crisis of more demand against the supply of top developers. It is enough to say that the main trends, such as cloud computing and the rise of platforms like Windows, excluding programming languages such as JavaScript and Python, are enough to say that it is pertinent for every stakeholder in the tech world to be abreast with them.

The future of software development is looking absolutely bright, with all avenues open for innovation and growth. It is one of the exciting zones to look forward to in the years to come.