Tarek Ziadé notes a burgeoning trend based on distributed version control that I think is quite important:
“There’s a trend these days on Github-based online services. That is — point me your Github repo and I’ll do something with it everytime you push a change.”
DVCSs, among other things, fundamentally make completely explicit the act of creating a delta on a repository. The explicit commit presents all sorts of opportunities for automation over a code repository. As Tarek points out, it‘s not exactly a new trend, but seems to be accelerating with the popularity of services such as GitHub.
His point about dashboards is intriguing. I‘d extend it to whole ecosystems of repositories. Betcha GitHub has all sorts of interesting dashboards for their internal QA monitoring.