AI: Driving the future of Software development

With increasing digital transformation, the need for custom software is also increasing. AI in software development is impacting each phase of the software lifecycle, enhancing, and automating the traditional processes, and improving productivity through speed, quality and cost

- Ashok Pandey

The Artificial Intelligence (AI) revolution is silently brewing in the way we think about and write software. Popularly, the next wave of AI-driven software development is known as Software 2.0. You often find statements like, “AI is eating software.” We’re not sure about that, but one thing is true: AI is changing the way software is written.

Imagine the traditional flow of software development. A programmer identifies the key idea (algorithm/approach) to solve a problem and, subsequently, writes appropriate code. In this workflow, all the hard work of coming up with the approach to the problem rests firmly on the programmer’s shoulders. (Good for everyone, except the poor, put-upon programmer).

But imagine a slightly different scenario. An AI algorithm is provided with examples of expected inputs and outputs. Using this information, AI determines the correct algorithm/approach that would result in different inputs being transformed into appropriate outputs. (And our programmer becomes a little less put-upon in the process. Win-win.)

Programmers painstakingly and carefully design software systems, “instruction by instruction,” in a process that can be slow, tedious, and error-prone. But, with new developments in AI, that is all changing. Instead of programming “instruction by instruction,” the industry is moving to a paradigm of programming “example by example.” Many examples of what we want the program to do can be collected (or not do) and labeled using a simple scheme. These examples are then fed to a machine learning algorithm that trains our algorithm. At the end of this process, a “trained model” appears that can be used as a program.