The 2025 State of Application Development Report
As business demand for applications shows no sign of slowing down, IT leaders must find ways to improve their software development practices to keep up. Quality is just as critical as quantity and speed, and so, this quest for improvement is really about threading the needle on delivering fast and delivering well. Taking a step back to evaluate your development processes against the latest application development best practices is key for finding sustainable solutions for this challenge.
Why application development best practices matter
Software development best practices offer a proven path for organizations to leapfrog common issues and challenges. Implementing these best practices helps ensure high-quality, scalable, maintainable code, even with limited resources.
When your team follows the six best practices covered in this blog, your organization can shrink its project backlog, modernize clunky legacy and shadow IT apps, and reduce security risks and maintenance complexity. With reclaimed time and resources, you can turn to more strategic and innovative digital projects.
6 best practices for application development you should implement in 2025
This list of software development best practices can put your company on the path to building enterprise and consumer apps faster while reducing costs and boosting innovation.
Best practice #1: Prioritize secure and scalable architecture
Security vulnerabilities lurk in the shadows of outdated technologies and apps created without IT oversight. Therefore, replacing them gives you the opportunity to codify secure development principles, such as zero trust and DevSecOps, in all aspects of your architecture.
Equally important is architecture that scales. That’s where another important principle comes in: moving from monolithic architectures to microservices and component-based apps. By deconstructing large codebases into small, independent microservices, you can make updates without redeploying the entire app or risking breaking dependencies.
Best practice #2: Implement CI/CD for faster, more reliable development
Continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) automates the software delivery pipeline, from code changes to production. CI regularly merges code changes into a shared repository, where automated version control and continuous testing help catch issues earlier when it’s easier and cheaper to fix them. CD refers to the automated process of delivering software changes to a production-ready environment. The result is frequent, reliable releases with higher-quality code.
A centralized console for app deployment and management across different environments—along with automated infrastructure setup and scaling—reduces manual management and repetitive, time-consuming tasks. In addition, CI/CD minimizes errors and inconsistent configurations and improves app reliability and security.
Best practice #3 Adopt a user-centric approach
User experience (UX) and accessibility should be guiding forces for any application. A centralized repository of validated templates and components can help you prioritize UX and ensure consistent experiences, accelerate work, ease governance, and level up less seasoned developers. Be sure to use built-in accessibility features in your development practice, such as focus states, enhanced contrast, and accessible links as well.
CI/CD also improves UX because of its focus on optimizing code, which creates more reliable and quicker-to-load apps. Automated infrastructure can also improve the performance and runtime of apps.
Best practice #4: Future-proof development with cloud readiness and cloud-native
Cloud readiness and cloud-native development enable development to proceed smoothly even in the face of dramatic process and method changes. Cloud readiness prepares you for cloud-native development because developers are designing, building, and maintaining software that uses cloud computing platforms. Cloud-native offers containerization, microservices, orchestration, and standardized protocols like API and REST that support consistent deployment and management across diverse environments.
Both cloud readiness and cloud-native deliver greater scalability, resilience, and adaptability. Your apps can automatically flex to meet demand, be more easily adapted to evolving technology and changing market conditions, and leverage streamlined integration with other cloud-native services.
Best practice #5: Remove complexity from development
It’s no secret that developing apps to meet today’s needs, such as exceptional UX, the ability to run on multiple platforms and infrastructures, and everything in between, has significantly increased development complexity. Modular design, microservices architecture, design patterns, and well-defined APIs help abstract away this complexity.
Approaches like low-code, no-code, and generative AI coding simplify application development by eliminating hand coding. Low-code can also provide reusable components, managed infrastructure, and pre-built templates and connectors. If you are evaluating any or all of these, consider a solution that produces standard, portable code that can still be edited and extended by developers and accessed by their favorite third-party or open-source tools.
Best practice #6: Build a center of excellence (CoE) for continuous improvement and innovation
Great apps beget new ideas and requests for more apps. Don’t let the hard work you've put into establishing best practices be wrecked by a lack of training, resources, or ability to scale.
A center of excellence (CoE) can provide the governance, control, and resources that enable your developers to meet demands without losing sight of best practices. The CoE can provide training, validated components, consistent UX guidelines and design principles, regulatory and accessibility guidance, and everything else that supports digital innovation and continuous improvement within guardrails.
How to implement these app dev best practices
The cornerstone of application development best practices in 2025 is low-code. This approach—backed by a development platform that is powered by AI—helps developers streamline processes and do more with less so they can deliver the apps that run your business and delight customers faster and more easily.
Download the low-code FAQs to uncover the truth about low-code development flexibility, customization, and security.
