When I was a junior developer, the sort of books and blogs I read off-the-clock tended to be about design patterns, abstractions, test-driven development (TDD) and so on. These topics haven’t gone away, but these days we tend to focus more on rapid application delivery, continuous integration, feedback loops and continuous improvement in the development process of that software, not necessarily the software itself.

Much of the classic developer reading material has strong craftsman-like overtones, the excellent Pragmatic Programmer being the most obvious example. On the other hand, some of the more recent material, like Continuous Delivery or The DevOps Handbook, describe the process of developing software as a factory production line to be optimized, inspired by the lean manufacturing revolution at the likes of Toyota in the 1980s.

Is the change in imagery from the master artisan to the fine-tuned production line a sign of progress or something to be worried about? It looks like the software industry’s Industrial Revolution might have started.