Software Factories Applied

Keith Short, Mauro Regio and I have agreed to write a new book called Software Factories Applied. Our goal is to write a short book for practitioners that complements the theoretical foundation established in the original Software Factories book by showing how to build a software factory using currently available technologies, namely the DSL tools, the Guidance Automation Toolkit and Visual Studio 2005 Team System. A key topic covered in the book will be how to build a software factory schema, which is the model at the heart of a software factory. Our plan is to walk through a complete worked example from end to end, showing what we did at each step. It will probably be based on a Business Collaboration Factory that generalizes the HL7 factory that Mauro and I developed. You can read about the lessons learned in the development of that factory in this paper that we contributed to the International Workshop on Software Factories at OOPSLA 2005.