5 Key Trends for 2023 and Beyond in Agile, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering by Alok Uniyal, VP & Head – Process Consulting, Infosys

The embrace of digital technologies, along with simplification and modernization of the existing technology landscape, will continue to be a dominant theme in 2023. Talks of the impending economic downturn may dampen the aggressive plans that enterprises had drawn, making them more cautious in their tech spending. CIOs will look at creating business value securely and reliably and at optimal costs. 

Five key trends to watch out for:

1. Product & platform thinkingwill gather momentum, accelerating the evolution of agile ways of working to the next level. This will push enterprises to reimagine their operating models and scale up their capabilities in experience design, product management, and full-stack engineering – while widening and deepening the agile-DevOps-Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practices.
2. Observability in customer journeys and underlying value streams will become a key imperative, driven by the need to provide frictionless end-user experience. The scope of SRE, which has been operations-centric so far, will start 'shifting left' to cover the end-to-end value stream, ensuring resilience in critical customer journeys/business services. 
3. A data-driven approach to software engineeringwill pick up the pace, using advanced analytics and AI/ML on data from underlying Application Lifecycle Management (ALM)/DevOps/SRE tooling. This will provide real-time visibility into the value streams, enable traceability of objectives and key results (OKRs), amplify productivity and predictability, and drive better outcomes.
4. DevSecOps at scalewill be critical in addressing the increasing security concerns in the digital world. Integration and automation of security practices in the DevOps lifecycle will become a norm.
5. Chaos Engineering will emerge as a mainstream practice to discover potential failure points and vulnerabilities as digital infrastructure scale up rapidly and systems get increasingly distributed and complex.

These trends will shape the future ways of working of enterprises as they look at warding off the threat from digital natives by transforming themselves to think and act like one.