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The InfoQ trends reports provide a snapshot of emerging software technology and ideas. We create the reports and accompanying graphs to aid software engineers and architects in evaluating what trends may help them design and build better software. Our editorial teams also use them to help focus our content on innovator and early adopter trends.

One of the core goals of InfoQ is to spot the emerging trends in software development that have broad applicability and make our audience aware of them early. Individual editors are constantly watching for new technologies and practices and then reporting on them. In addition to writing news for the InfoQ readers, our editorial teams also regularly discuss what they’re seeing, and how companies are adopting innovative ideas.

The process to create the trends reports is extremely collaborative, and draws on the collective experience of our practitioner editors. Our real-world experience helps us look past marketing hype and look for new patterns that are actually being put to use.

Following the ideas of Geoffrey Moore in Crossing the Chasm, we categorize the trends into adoption categories. We identify what is new and innovative, and reevaluate earlier trends to see how their adoption has changed since the last report. If you’re trying to understand if a technology you just heard about is brand new, or just new to you, the trends graphs are a great tool to judge how the broader industry is using it.

This eMag is an anthology of the InfoQ Trends Reports for 2022. Each trends report focuses on one persona or category. Because software engineering is rarely confined to a single area, your individual interests likely overlap with many of the reports. The culture and methods report is clearly the most cross-cutting, as it covers how teams are building and maintaining software.

You will also find some individual trends listed on multiple reports, sometimes with differing adoption levels as they pertain to a different audience. For example, cloud-native development and gRPC are in earlier stages of adoption within the .NET community compared to software architecture and cloud development in general.

Data was a major component on several trends reports this year, beyond the AI, ML & Data Engineering report. The Architecture & Design report described “data plus architecture” as a need for software architecture to adapt to consider data. The DevOps and Clouds report had data observability as a critical need. Data mesh also showed up in multiple reports.

New trends reports are published throughout the year. You can see all the historical reports here. From there, you can follow the “InfoQ Trends Report” topic to always be informed when one is released.

With the inclusion of all the reports published in the past twelve months, we hope this eMag can serve as a helpful single reference for trends across the overall software development landscape.

We would love to receive your feedback via editors@infoq.com or on Twitter about this eMag. I hope you have a great time reading it!

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