Artificial Intelligence is transforming our lives at an incredibly fast rate, and this is only going to increase over the next few years – or even months. This technology is now impacting not only on our lives at home but also at work; particularly if you work in software development. That’s because machine learning is helping in a number of ways to help invent new technology but also to speed up the software development lifecycle.
Whilst, traditionally, an engineer would write a number of rules for various outcomes that could be predicted, for certain activities it is almost impossible to write as many rules as would be needed and the result would be far too complex. For example; writing a program facial recognition or recognising objects in photos is a task that is far too complex to accomplish using traditional development methods.
That is where artificial intelligence techniques – such as deep and machine learning – can step in. Rather than writing a set of rules so that the programme can choose an outcome, the software engineer creates and prepares data which is then inputted in to learning algorithms. These algorithms are continuously improved; after all, the technology is called artificial intelligence, and the key is in the fact that the algorithm will continually learn from itself. In simple terms, machine learning is the program using data to decide what patterns and features are the most important without the need for an engineer to write predicted rules.
The use of AI in software development could completely change the way we think of software development, how we define it and how we use it. There could be many advantages of embedding AI techniques in the software development life cycle, such as:
– Easier for future software engineers to learn
– Better than human coding in certain circumstances – video, sound etc
– More agility
– Easily portable and transferable
– Many more
An architects role in all of this will be to keep up with the ever changing landscape of AI, to ensure that software and applications stay in line with organisations goals and their IT strategies, and to ensure software is created in such a way that will improve IT functions.
What are your thoughts on AI in software development? Would you be happy to take away the human element in the future? The next question to ask, could AI create AI?
