Increase Productivity, Quality, and Efficiency with Platform Engineering

Listed by Gartner as one of the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2024, Platform Engineering aims at improving "developer experience and productivity by providing self-service capabilities with automated infrastructure operations." The topic is particularly dear to us at Qt Group, as, despite its tending right now, the platform approach has been familiar to us since the early years of Qt within Nokia, when Qt was used as part of the Symbian operating system for the S60 platform and deployed to a variety of products. Over the years, we have seen many of our customers successfully leveraging Qt as the cornerstone of their platform strategy for streamlining a configure-to-order software development approach enabling standardization, reusability, and customizability of high-quality code across devices. As our multi-product offering has now grown to encompass the entire software development lifecycle—including Design and Quality Assurance next to the well-known Qt Framework—we see with enthusiasm the rise of this technological trend, recognizing the great potential for our customers to leverage Qt technology as a key enabler towards a more advanced level of digitalization.

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What is Platform Engineering

As the need to integrate more and more advanced functionality within digital devices increases, software complexity increases accordingly. To mention only a few of our customers' recurring needs: connectivity to the cloud, sensors, and machine-to-machine have become essential for process automation and remote operability. Rich graphical user interfaces are a key element in enabling seamless interaction with machines and brand differentiation. Advanced 3D graphics are crucial to modeling complex aspects of reality via digital twins. Finally, scaling code and functionality across a variety of devices for different products or models adds further complexity, as code reusability is not an inherent property of every framework.

A platform strategy in the embedded software domain helps with these challenges and more. Quoting Paul Delory, VP Analyst at Gartner

Platform engineering emerged in response to the increasing complexity of modern software architectures. Today, non-expert end users are often asked to operate an assembly of complicated, arcane services.

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In our words, we can say that an engineering platform provides standards, templates, APIs, well-proven best practices for development teams to innovate rapidly and effectively. In the embedded software context, a good engineering platform helps comply with industry-specific standards and provides predefined high-quality, reusable code elements, API integrations, and more to improve the satisfaction and productivity of embedded software developers.

Forecasts and Market Research

According to Gartner, by 2026, 80% of large software engineering organizations will establish platform engineering teams as internal providers of reusable services, components, and tools for application delivery. To know more about this, we have commissioned Forrester Consulting a Market Research and Thought Leadership Paper on the theme of Platform Engineering in Embedded Software Development to understand, among other things, the level of platform development across various industries (most notably, manufacturing, automotive, medical, consumer appliances), the challenges in moving towards platform-based development, the main use cases and the benefits deriving from its adoption.

Forrester has also independently published a report that validates the benefits of the shift to a low-code, agile platform strategy—underlining values such as faster development, improved productivity, and higher quality. Access the report here: Low-Code And Agile: Rocket Fuel For Digital Business.