Software Development in the Post-PC Era: Towards Software Development as a Service

Over the years, software development has evolved to meet the needs of new types of applications and to embrace new technological disruptions. Today, we witness the rise of mobility where the role of the conventional high-end PC is declining. Some refer to this era as the Post-PC era. This technological shift, powered by a key enabling technology, cloud computing, has opened new opportunities for human advancement. Consequently, the evolving landscape of software systems drives the need for new methods for conceiving them. Such methods need to: (a) address the challenges and requirements of this era and (b) embrace the benefits of new technological breakthroughs. In this paper, we list the characteristics of the Post-PC era from the software development perspective and describe two motivating trends of software development processes. Then, we derive a list of requirements for the future software development from the characteristics of the Post-PC era and from the motivating trends. Finally, we propose a reference architecture for cloud-based software process enactment as an enabler for Software Development as a Service. The architecture is the first step addressing the needs that we have identified.