Top Tools for Developers in 2024

Anastasia Ostapenko

The ratings of the best software development tools are time-sensitive: new tools emerge every now and then. Monitoring and mastering them is a full-time job, and sometimes a waste of time, too, since some oldies but goldies remain chosen by the team. 

Having done all the hard choices for you, we are sharing our list of top tools for developers in 2024: from design and code completion to database management, code quality review, and, last but not the least, performance testing.

Design

Figma: Figma is a cloud-based design and prototyping tool that has revolutionized the way teams create, collaborate, and share designs for digital projects. Its user-friendly interface and powerful features make it highly accessible to designers, developers, and project managers alike. Figma facilitates real-time collaboration, allowing multiple team members to work on the same project simultaneously from anywhere in the world.

Key features of Figma include:

• vector networks for flexible design creation,
• an extensive library of components and templates to speed up the design process,
• dynamic prototyping capabilities that enable designers to create interactive prototypes without the need for coding,
• auto-layout function which helps in creating responsive designs that adapt to different screen sizes, enhancing the user experience across devices.

Figma also integrates seamlessly with other tools and platforms, streamlining the workflow from design to development. Its ability to generate code snippets for CSS, iOS, and Android makes it an invaluable tool for developers looking to implement designs with precision. The platform supports version control, ensuring that every change is tracked and can be revisited or reverted if necessary.

With its comprehensive set of features, Figma stands out as a preferred tool for UI/UX design, enabling teams to bring their digital products to life efficiently and collaboratively. Its emphasis on teamwork and accessibility has made Figma a key player in the design and development ecosystem, facilitating a smoother transition from concept to final product.

Code Completion

Copilot: Copilot is an AI-powered code completion tool designed to help software developers write code more efficiently. It works by suggesting entire lines or blocks of code as you type, based on the context of the code you’re working on. 

Copilot is built on the OpenAI Codex model and has been trained on a vast corpus of public source code, making it capable of understanding and generating code in a wide range of programming languages and styles.

For software developers, GitHub Copilot acts as a virtual pair programmer, offering suggestions for code, tests, and even complex algorithms, which can significantly speed up the coding process and reduce the need for searching code snippets or documentation online. 

It’s integrated directly into popular development environments, such as Visual Studio Code, making it easily accessible during the development workflow. While incredibly powerful, developers are encouraged to review the code generated by Copilot, as it may not always be perfect or suit specific project

Version Control

Git: Version Control with Git enables developers to track and manage changes to their codebase. Git is a distributed version control system, which means that every developer working on a project has a complete copy of the codebase and its history on their local machine. This allows for robust collaboration among developers, as changes can be made independently and then merged into a shared repository.

For software developers, Git is indispensable for managing projects, contributing to open source, and working in teams. It enhances productivity, facilitates collaboration, and provides a safety net that allows for experimentation without the risk of losing work.

Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) and Code Editors

IntelliJ IDEA: IntelliJ IDEA is a powerful Integrated Development Environment (IDE) designed for software developers, particularly those working with Java, Kotlin, and other JVM-based languages. Developed by JetBrains, it offers a comprehensive suite of coding assistance features including smart code completion, on-the-fly code analysis, and refactoring support, which collectively enhance developer productivity and code quality. 

IntelliJ IDEA also supports a wide range of programming languages beyond Java, such as Scala, Groovy, and even non-JVM languages like Python and JavaScript with additional plugins.

One of the IDE’s standout features is its deep understanding of code structure, which allows it to provide highly relevant suggestions and detect issues with remarkable accuracy. Furthermore, IntelliJ IDEA integrates with major build automation tools and version control systems, offering a seamless development experience from writing code to deploying applications.

It also includes tools for database work, web development, and mobile app development, making it a versatile choice for developers working across different platforms. With its user-friendly interface and robust feature set, IntelliJ IDEA is favored by professionals seeking to streamline their development workflow and increase efficiency.

Project Management and Collaboration

Jira: Jira is a widely used project management tool designed by Atlassian, primarily catering to software development teams. It is best known for its issue and project tracking capabilities, allowing teams to organize, assign, and prioritize tasks effectively.

Jira supports Agile methodologies, such as Scrum and Kanban, making it a popular choice for teams practicing Agile development. It offers features like sprint planning, backlogs, boards, and reports that are essential for managing Agile projects.

Beyond project management, Jira is highly customizable, enabling teams to configure workflows, fields, and screens to match their specific project needs. It also integrates with a broad ecosystem of tools:

• development software,
• continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) software,
• collaboration software.

Jira’s ability to track every aspect of software development from concept to launch helps teams improve their productivity, collaboration, and the quality of their software products. With its comprehensive features and flexibility, Jira is a cornerstone tool for teams aiming to streamline their development processes and enhance project visibility.

Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)

Jenkins: Jenkins is an open-source automation server widely used by developers and DevOps teams to automate the building, testing, and deployment phases of software development. It is written in Java and offers a vast ecosystem of plugins, making it highly customizable and extensible to suit a wide variety of CI/CD and automation needs. 

Jenkins enables teams to continuously integrate code into the project, allowing for early detection of integration errors, improving quality, and reducing the time to deliver features.

One of the key strengths of Jenkins is its ability to support various types of projects, from simple to complex, across different languages and technologies. It integrates seamlessly with a multitude of version control systems, build tools, and testing frameworks. Jenkins facilitates continuous delivery by automating the deployment process, making it easier for teams to push code changes to production environments quickly and safely.

Jenkins can be run in standalone mode with its built-in web server or be configured on various operating systems. Its pipeline feature allows for implementing complex automation scenarios that can encompass building, testing, and deploying applications across multiple environments. 

The Jenkins community is active and robust, contributing to the constant development of new plugins and features. This tool is essential for teams looking to adopt DevOps practices, enhance productivity, and achieve a faster time to market.

Containerization and Orchestration

Docker: Docker is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) product that uses OS-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers. Containers are isolated from each other and bundle their own software, libraries, and configuration files; they can communicate with each other through well-defined channels. 

The key advantage of Docker is its ability to allow users to package an application with all of its dependencies into a standardized unit for software development, ensuring that it runs seamlessly in any environment.

Docker simplifies the process of managing applications in a microservices architecture, as it streamlines the creation, deployment, and running of applications by using containers. This is particularly useful for developers and system administrators looking to improve deployment frequency and reduce the time between writing code and running it in production environments.

Docker key features:

• Portability: Since Docker containers can run on any system that supports Docker, they eliminate the “it works on my machine” problem.
• Consistency: Provides a consistent environment for development, testing, and production. This consistency speeds up development and deployment cycles.
• Isolation: Containers are isolated from each other and the host system, making it secure and efficient to run multiple containers on a single host.
• Scalability and Modularity: Docker makes it easy to scale out applications by adding new containers for new modules and services.

Docker has become an integral part of the DevOps toolchain, facilitating continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) practices by making it easier to manage parts of the application lifecycle.

Database Management

• MySQL Workbench: A unified visual tool for database architects, developers, and DBAs to design, model, generate, and manage MySQL databases.
• MongoDB Compass: The GUI for MongoDB, offering a visual representation of your database to find, insert, modify, and delete data.

API Development and Testing:

Postman: Postman is a popular API (Application Programming Interface) development tool used by software developers to create, share, test, and document APIs. It provides a user-friendly graphical interface that simplifies each step of the API lifecycle, from designing and testing to documentation and sharing. Postman supports both RESTful and SOAP APIs, making it a versatile tool for developers working across different web technologies.

Key features of Postman include:

• Easy Testing of APIs: Developers can send requests to the API, receive responses, and easily examine the data without writing complex code.
• Automation: Postman allows for the automation of tests by scripting tests to run as part of a collection of requests, making it easy to validate API behavior.
• Collaboration: Teams can work together on API development by sharing collections and environments, improving efficiency and consistency.
• Documentation: It automatically generates and hosts API documentation, making it accessible to developers and stakeholders.
• Mock Servers: Developers can simulate API endpoints, which is useful during the early stages of development when the actual API might not be available.

Postman’s ability to streamline API development and testing processes has made it an essential tool in modern software development workflows, especially in microservices architectures where multiple APIs are in use. 

Its extensive support for different types of APIs, along with its features for testing, automation, and collaboration, contribute to its widespread adoption among developers.

Code Quality and Review

SonarQube: SonarQube is an open-source platform used for continuous inspection of code quality to perform automatic reviews with static analysis of code to detect bugs, code smells, and security vulnerabilities. 

It supports multiple programming languages, including Java, C#, JavaScript, TypeScript, Kotlin, Python, and more, making it versatile for use in a wide range of development projects.

SonarQube integrates into the CI/CD pipeline, enabling developers to identify and address issues early in the development process, thereby enhancing code quality and maintainability. 

It provides a detailed dashboard that offers insights into code health, including metrics on code complexity, duplicated code, unit test coverage, and code documentation. This dashboard is invaluable for tracking the progress of code quality improvements over time.

Key features of Postman include:

• Automated Code Review: Automatically scans codebases for bugs, vulnerabilities, and code smells, offering suggestions for improvements.
• Quality Gate: Defines criteria for code quality that must be met before code can be promoted to production, helping to enforce coding standards and improve overall quality.
• Security Analysis: Identifies and highlights potential security vulnerabilities within the code, aiding in the development of more secure applications.
• Technical Debt Management: Estimates the effort required to fix issues and reduce technical debt, providing a clear picture of the health of the codebase.

SonarQube is an essential tool for development teams aiming to systematically improve their code quality. Its comprehensive analysis helps in making informed decisions about where to focus development efforts, leading to more maintainable, secure, and high-quality software.

Monitoring

Grafana: Grafana is an open-source platform for monitoring and observability, widely used for visualizing time series data. It allows users to create dashboards with panels that represent specific metrics over time from multiple sources, such as Prometheus, InfluxDB, Graphite, and ElasticSearch, among others. 

Grafana is highly valued for its ability to make complex data from various sources accessible and understandable through its rich visualizations, including graphs, charts, and alerts.

Grafana’s key features include:

• Customizable Dashboards: Users can customize dashboards to display data according to their specific needs, using a wide range of visualization options.
• Data Sources Integration: It supports integration with numerous data sources, making it versatile for displaying data from different environments and platforms.
• Alerting: Grafana provides alerting tools that notify users of threshold breaches, making it easier to respond to issues in real-time.
• Collaboration: Supports sharing of dashboards and data visualizations, facilitating collaboration among team members.
• Extensibility: Through plugins, Grafana can be extended to include additional data sources, panels, and other features.

For software developers and operations teams, Grafana is an indispensable tool for real-time performance monitoring, infrastructure health monitoring, and data analysis. It enhances the ability to detect and diagnose operational issues quickly, thereby improving the reliability and performance of applications and services.

Performance Testing

PFLB: PFLB emerges as a cutting-edge cloud-based tool for comprehensive load testing, catering to a wide audience from marketers to developers, product managers, and performance engineers. The platform distinguishes itself by enabling complex load testing for websites, mobile applications, REST, and gRPC API services directly from the cloud, ensuring accessibility and efficiency for all users, regardless of their technical expertise.

Designed with user-friendliness at its core, PFLB simplifies performance testing by:

• Allowing the import of load profile data from analytics tools like Google Analytics
• Facilitating test creation without the need for coding skills.

Its standout feature is the ability to conduct performance tests in the cloud, offering a full suite of testing tools that include HAR/Insomnia import, request definition, and test parameterization, all delivered as a Software as a Service (SaaS).

For developers and performance engineers, the platform provides a seamless testing experience with capabilities for managing tests, centralizing assets, and comparing results across tests to quickly identify trends and bottlenecks. Product and project managers benefit from online dashboards offering detailed insights into test outcomes, and enhancing decision-making processes.

Key advantages of PFLB are:

• easy-to-use interface,
• no-code test creation,
• integration with JMeter for existing workflow support,
• comprehensive reporting features that allow for easy sharing and analysis of test results.

Despite its broad capabilities, the platform currently supports only HTTP(-s)-based protocols, with more extensive testing environments requiring an Enterprise license.

PFLB’s pricing model is subscription-based, offering flexibility and cost-efficiency with a free license for initial testing needs and scalable options for more extensive testing requirements. It positions itself as an ideal solution for accelerating testing cycles, especially for users new to performance testing, promising a significant enhancement in testing efficiency and quality.

Conclusion

Of course, there’s no universally accepted list of best tools. Choices vary based on project needs, team expertise, and technology stack.

The tools listed above are used by our engineers for performance monitoring, testing, and optimization across both internal and external projects.

If you have questions regarding monitoring and testing your project, we’re always ready to advise and assist with any load and performance testing issues. We work with major USA clients and across various industries worldwide, including Banking, Healthcare, Retail, Manufacturing, Food industries, and more.

Simply reach out to us or fill out the ‘Get a Quote’ form!