Although firmly seated in the .NET industry, I try to keep tabs on the other camps to see what they’re up to. A lot of people are now really starting to master what we today call agile software development. They’ve harvested the benefits agile has had to offer – and they want more. A profound example of this is the concept of continuous deployment(read his follow-up too), as explained by Timothy Fitz:

“The high level of our process is dead simple: Continuously integrate (commit early and often). On commit automatically run all tests. If the tests pass [automatically] deploy to [production.]”

Johannes Brodwall has a thoughtful post on what the future of software development may look like. His vision is a mainstream adoption of continuous automation: continuous testing, distributed source control, continuous integration, continuous deployment.

I’m left wondering – where’s the .NET community? Are we lagging behind the curve? If you’ve not yet picked up on the concepts that we’ve been preaching about the last few years, such as continuous integration and unit testing, you should be getting worried about being able to keep up – the leaders of the pack are already moving on.

This autumn, I’ll be giving a series of talks at the MSDN Live conferences across Norway, where I’ll both be discussing and demonstrating some of the ways we can push the envelope with agile software development within the .NET space.