To me, a character is not really a discrete entity that development and progression occur to as a special event or instance.

Many roleplayers will, over time, develop a cast of 'Regulars' that they prefer to use, and who can be easily or at least readily adapted to any number of contextual realities for the purposes of a given roleplay. The process I use is similar in that I have a cast of of template characters, but they are small in number and are more similar than different. What enables me to turn each template into what others might perceive as a distinct and unique character is just a matter of circumstance - literally. What I do is highly formulaic and ordered, but occurs across time and creates vast depth.

At this particular moment I have around six or so templates that I have used regularly throughout my roleplaying history, but those six basic templates have been used to create somewhere within the realm of 120 distinct, unique characters that under normal circumstances would not be recognized as the same - the important thing to note here being that most of those unique entities are, in fact, the exact same being simply exposed to different contexts and experiences. The exact process I use is a touch arcane and also private, but I will remark that it is involved enough that each character would have different genetics while still effectively being 'the same person' at least in a purely physical sense. They were derived from the same clay, in a manner of speaking. This also factors into account the in-context inception of their being; the method I use necessarily breaks the contextual reality of any given roleplay (if only for a single moment in the past) - or more simply put, no matter the setting, even in nonfiction, my characters essentially erupt from nothingness. Call it metafictional metastasis.

td;lr, the world shapes the character. As the world grows and as more detail becomes apparent, so to more defined does the character become - retroactively and in a fashion not-inconsistent with prior information or behavior. The only time when a character's development becomes problematic is when other roleplayers act in a fashion, IC, that breaks the contextual reality of the roleplay. 

Progression and development are therefore preexisting elements that occur autonomously. No individual character is a static being.