Research into UK SME technology adoption consistently shows a significant gap between AI interest and AI integration. Industry surveys conducted in 2025 and 2026 suggest that the majority of UK small businesses express interest in using AI in their operations, but fewer than one in five have integrated it into any...
Software Development
Articles, guides and tutorials on software development, covering methodologies, tools, languages and best practices for building production-grade software.
Searches for “technical debt” have grown by over 35% in the past two years, driven in large part by UK engineering teams inheriting legacy systems built under deadline pressure and now struggling to maintain or extend them. The term gets used loosely in Jira backlogs and sprint retrospectives, but most developers have...
Searches for “hire software developer UK” increased 28% between 2024 and 2025, and demand shows no sign of slowing. The UK software development market remains candidate-short at senior level, with experienced engineers in high demand across fintech, healthtech, and SaaS. For a business or startup looking to hire...
Interest in CI/CD automation has grown consistently over the past three years, and search volume for “CI/CD pipeline setup” rose 34% in 2025 alone. Despite that, the majority of UK development agencies still deploy via manual SSH sessions or ad-hoc scripts. That gap represents a significant competitive disadvantage:...
Search interest in “how to build a web app” has grown 40% in the past two years, and the searches are getting more specific: people are not just asking whether it is possible, they want to know how long it takes, what it costs, and what to do first. In 2026, the tooling available to a small team or solo developer is...
Search interest in “Node.js vs Python” has grown roughly 25% year-on-year and shows no signs of levelling off. That is not surprising: both ecosystems have matured considerably, both have first-class async support, and neither is going anywhere. What has shifted in 2026 is the weight that AI and machine learning...
AI code review has moved from experimental to production-standard in 2026. Development teams that once debated whether AI could reliably review code are now debating which tool to use and how deeply to integrate it. The quality of AI-generated code review has improved to the point where, for many categories of finding,...
COBOL powers an estimated hundreds of billions of lines of code still running in global financial systems, government infrastructure, and enterprise backends. In the UK, many of those systems are running in banks, insurance companies, public sector organisations, and large retailers. The developers who wrote them are...
Outsourcing software development has grown significantly as a search topic in the UK, with “outsourcing software development” up 70% and “software development outsourcing” up 60% over the past three months. UK businesses are actively looking for external development capacity, but many are uncertain whether to engage a...
Backend development search interest has grown 80% to 110% across UK keyword data in the past three months, appearing in both software development and web development research categories. That dual presence tells you something important: backend skills are now in demand from businesses that have historically focused on...