If you step back for a minute, writing software must be the worlds’ largest cottage industry. Many IT departments seem like open plan sweatshops with legions of developers mesmerised by technical complexities and working to unreasonable deadlines. My point is “Where is the industrialisation of software development?” We use computers to help us write the code but why are not computers used to write the code itself? It seems odd that we can automate other industries but we can’t automate our own. Visual Studio is fundamentally just a text editor.

As an aside, there is now a very real trend to using cheap offshore development in order to cut costs. Software development is following the exodus of other labour intensive industries to countries that can provide cheap labour. India is the prime beneficiary.