Tuesday, 24 July 2007

The Next Big Thing in Software Development

After the post from William I was reflecting on the buzz of the early days in the Extreme Programming group. There was lots of stuff going on, lots of ideas going around, lots of people trying things, and a bunch of those people are now authors of some well respected books, blogs, and tools.

These days much of the XP user group is around the subtleties of XP and teaching newbies the basics. Many of the ideas, tools and techniques are reasonably mature now.

The two other big things that were going on at the same time was a surge in dynamic and functional languages and techniques and also Usability / User Experience (Ux). These ideas haven't fully gone mainstream but they are picking up popularity at a rapid rate.

It's been fun riding the edge of some of these things.

The question is, what's next?

I think the next big thing in the software world is going to be software factories. They are not a new idea, in fact I remember hearing about some of the ideas that make up software factories back in the 90s.

The thing is, software factories at the moment seem a bit kludgy. They aren't easy to create and they aren't easy to use. I think the power in them is when it's easy to create your own and wield them with the power of things like Resharper. I think a bunch of software technologies are slowly aligning to make these things a lot easier.

I think once we have practical software factories that are easy to create and use the level of productivity of those using them is going to sky rocket.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Bring on the ToolFactoryFactoryFactorys! :)

Keith said...

Exactly!

Though I'm only wanting a ToolFactoryFactory :)

Even then Im not sure that it's a workable idea for the likes of C# / C++. I think it all ends up a bit messy. You need a language which inherently understands factories (preserves the generation semantics?). Which you could do through metadata type stuff.... but I'm pretty sure thats gonna be a pig with lipstick