Software Factory automates Software Product Line

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Linda Northrop's Software Product Line keynote  at ASWEC set the scene perfectly for my presentation on "Software Factory". In her presentation, she pointed out a few key impedences and issues related to the adoption of Software Product Line:

  • cost of entry into software product line is non-trivial, both in terms of $ and time
  • inadequate scope definition, large scope means too much feature variation between products and family of products, leading to bad economies of scales (in reuse)
  • to achieve successful software product line adoption, you need to consider both the product and process propositions

My presentation was essentially about how Software Factory and VSTS2005 addresses each one of these challenges, and how adoption can be accelerated through:

  • automation through tools, patterns, framework, templates
  • use of domain specific languages to solve targeted problems and to enable model driven design (using the DSL tools)
  • constraint based scheduling to enable scaling up of agile methods, and to provide guidance in context (using the Guidance Automation Toolkit)

you can actually download my presentation from the ASWEC download site. Feedback welcome!

And if you're a beginner to Software Factory, best to get started by visiting Jack Greenfield and Keith Short's wonderful blogs on this subject matter, and the MSDN website all about Software Factory.