Top 10 software development stories of 2022

Software development was thrown into the spotlight right at the start of 2022, with the discovery of a vulnerability in the open source Log4J logging service used by developers to monitor their Java applications. This set the stage for a focus on improving the resilience of open source components.

Due to the way developers use open source, code libraries often depend on other libraries, which themselves depend on libraries. This creates a software supply chain, where the responsibility for fixing a vulnerability is far removed from the developer writing code.

It is this risk in the software supply chain that has led to the White House working with leading software companies to establish a bill of materials for software, which could be used to enable developers to understand where all the components comprising a new piece of software actually comes from and who has responsibility for these components.

Beyond security, businesses have also found that it is very difficult to become a software-driven business. Low-code tooling is helping to alleviate the dire lack of skills, but businesses also need to work in a truly agile way and understand how to run software initiatives as normal business operations, rather than big-bang projects. 

Here are Computer Weekly’s top 10 software development stories of 2022.