An embarrassment of riches

Years ago (but still within the last decade) I was involved in a source control trade study for a large multi-national corporation. Management had let a non-software developer select the original "source control tool" and they had picked something that required custom scripting just to do a baseline (I wish I was kidding).

So a bunch of candidate replacements were put forward for consideration, and CVS won because it was free, thus there would be fewer arguments with management about rolling it out on a project that was already over budget and behind schedule. (The fact that Subversion wasn't considered as a candidate should give you some additional hints about the precise timing of this - Subversion 1.0 was released in February 2004. Yes, for those that are new to this game, you read that right: it is only within the last decade that the majority of the open source VCS world began to enjoy the benefits of atomic commits).

Other interesting aspects of that system included the fact that one of the developers on that project basically had to write a custom xUnit testing system from scratch in order to start putting together a decent automated test suite for the system, there was no code review tool, and you couldn't include direct links to bug tracker items in emails or anything else - you had to reference them by name or number, and people would then look those names or numbers up in the dedicated bug tracking application client.

High level design documentation, if it existed at all, was in the form of Microsoft Word documents. Low level API documentation? Yes, that would have been nice (there were some attempts to generate something vaguely readable with Doxygen but, yeah, well, C++).

Less than ten years later, though, and there are signs our industry is starting to grow up (although I expect many enterprise shops are still paying extortionate rates to the likes of IBM for the "Rational" suite of tools only to gain a significantly inferior development experience):

1. You can get genuinely high quality code hosting for free. Sure Sourceforge was already around back then, but Git and Mercurial stomp all over CVS from a collaboration point of view. These also come with decent issue trackers and various other collaboration tools. If you don't want to trust a service provider with your code, than tools like GitLab let you set up similar environments internally.
2. Web based issue trackers are everywhere, with the ubiquitous "issue URL" allowing effective cross-linking between tracker issues, documentation, code comments, source control browsers, code review systems, etc.
3. Dedicated code review tools like Gerrit and Reitveld are published as open source (and, in the case of the latter, even available as a free service on Google App Engine).
4. Services like ReadTheDocs exist, allowing you to easily build and publish high quality documentation. All with nice URLs so you can link it from emails, tracker issues, source code, etc.
5. Organisations like Shining Panda CI and Travis CI provide hosted continuous integration services that put the internal capabilities of many large companies to shame.
6. Language communities provide cross-platform distribution services to reach a global audience.
7. Depending on the language you use, you may even have tools like SonarSource available
8. Once you go into production in the web application world, service components like Sentry, Piwik, and Graphite are again available for no charge.

And to access all this good stuff for free? All you have to do is be willing to share your work (and sometimes not even that). If you don't want to share your work, then the service providers generally have very reasonable fees - you could probably put together a state of the art suite of tools for less than a few hundred bucks a month.

Take my own hobby projects as an example:

• they're hosted on BitBucket as Mercurial projects (I happen to prefer Mercurial, although I can definitely see why people like Git, too). That gives me integrated issue tracking and online source code browsing, too. (OK, so I could have had essentially that back in the early SourceForge days, but the UI aspects have improved in many respects in the intervening years)
• I can publish my projects on the Python Package Index with a simple "setup.py sdist upload". They're then available for anyone in the world to install with a straightforward command like "pip install walkdir"
• thanks to Shining Panda CI, I know the downloads from PyPI work, and I also know that the projects work on all the versions and implementations of Python I want to support
• thanks to ReadTheDocs and Sphinx, you can read nicely formatted documentation like this rather than trying to decipher plain text files or wiki pages.

I'm living in the future and it is seriously cool (and that's just looking at things purely from a software development infrastructure point of view - the rise of "Infrastructure as a Service" and "Platform as a Service" providers, including Red Hat's own OpenShift, has massive implications on the deployment side of things, and there's of course the implications of the many open source wheels that don't need to be reinvented)

The best part from my point of view is that these days I get to work for a company that already genuinely understands the long term significance of the power of collaborative development. It also doesn't hurt that there's still a lot of money to be made in helping the rest of the enterprise world come to grips with that reality :)