Eric S. Raymond on risk and verification, or how automated tests (like in Test Driven Development) are changing software development:

Thirteen years ago I wrote that in the presence of a culture of decentralized peer review enabled by cheap communications, heavyweight traditional planning and management methods for software development start to look like pointless overhead. That has become conventional wisdom; but I think, perhaps, I see the next phase change emerging now. In the presence of sufficiently good automated verification, the heavyweight vetting, filtering, and review apparatus of open-source projects as we have known them also starts to look like pointless overhead.

The whole article is long but worth reading. As a bonus, the context is the reconstruction of the version history of INTERCAL-C in order to start using git to manage the source code!