O’Reilly Radar’s best and worst tech of the decade inspired me to think about trends in software development. In the past decade, one prevailing trend has been the migration of process in software development from management to individual developers. Traditionally, process has been imposed on the development team, who usually ignore the process or actively resist it. Or in many cases there just isn’t any process at all. Traditionally, “process” has been associated with project managers. Most processes had to be applied at the team level in order to work. Whether it was old school process like Waterfall or newer, agile processes like Scrum or Extreme Programming, everybody on the team has to participate for the processes to work. These processes are heavy, difficult to implement, and in many cases, completely ineffective. The most powerful contribution of Extreme Programming, though, was that it was much more developer-friendly than the other approaches, and it really arrived as a bundle of specific practices. XP made it easy for developers to pick the practices that they liked best from the whole collection and start applying them, whether or not management bought into XP as an approach. So we’ve seen specific XP components like test-driven development, refactoring, continuous integration, and small releases really find democratic support among programmers. A second major factor in encouraging developers to implement their own processes has been the growth of open source software. For one thing, it’s proven to be a laboratory for a lot of different approaches to building software, and for another, all of those approaches were implemented and used by developers themselves, and so they all work for at least some developers. The growth of open source software has also contributed a powerful set of programmer-friendly tools for implementing a development process, including version control, issue tracking, unit testing libraries, automated testing tools, continuous integration servers, project management applications, and more. The third major change we’ve seen in the past decade or so has been the growth of blogging. People talk a lot about the effect of blogging on other fields, but its effect on software development has been profound. There were ever many magazines that were aimed at working software developers. Back in the day, there were magazines like Information Week, InfoWorld, and PC World that were for IT management – not for the people doing the real work. Developers had Usenet and mailing lists, but blogging led to an explosion in the amount of information that was written by programmers for programmers. All of these factors contributed to developers stepping up and taking ownership of the process of developing software. These days, you see lone developers implementing a somewhat formal process for building software. Ten years ago, it was tough to find programmers who wrote unit test. Now there are a lot of programmers out there writing unit tests even when people aren’t looking. Programmers are taking ownership of the full life cycle of software development like never before as well. Take a look at some of the more recent writing on continuous deployment – it covers everything from requirements to maintenance to monitoring of running applications. More work done in public, public discussion of that work, and the introduction of new best practices have defined the trend of the decade – developers owning the processes under which they work. Hopefully it will continue in the next decade.