Building Software Factories - Factories 201

Factories 201 Series - Building Software Factories

• What are they (concretely)? (Edward)
• When would you build one? (Jezz)
• What do I tell my Manager? (Edward)
• How long will it take? (Jezz)
• What would you build? (Jezz)
• With what would you build it? (Edward)
• How would you build it? (Jezz)
• What should you strive for? (Edward)
• What are the challenges? (Jezz)

Post authors: Edward Bakker and Jezz Santos.

Well, we have finally come to the end of this 201 series on ‘Building Software Factories’.

First time arriving here? - we have listed the entire series above – please have a look through those posts before ending it below.

If you are arriving here after reading (hopefully all) the posts in the series, we wanted to say, good on you, and thanks for sticking it out with us.

Series Wrap-Up

Well, we have spent quite a bit of time and thought in putting this series together for you. The motivation behind this effort has been that we’ve recognised that there is little practical information helping ordinary professional developers on getting started with building and understanding software factories. We have had quite a head start on this and wanted to share our knowledge and experiences with you and the community to promote the uptake of building factories, which in turn should promote the adoption of software factories and the industrialisation of software in general.

This series was created in a format that asks a logical sequence of questions that you might have when trying to figure out how to build software factories today. We have covered many such issues as they arose and shared much of the combined knowledge and experiences built up over the last few years in this space. We will be sharing more resources on this in future posts – so stay tuned to our blogs.

We hope that you can take the guidance represented in this series forward as a starting point for developing your own software factories further. We recognise openly and frankly in the series that this is not a trivial undertaking today, but hopefully we have shown you that it is very possible and how to successfully approach it. Hopefully we have also directed you to what’s most important, where you should direct your energies, and how to build factories practically and realistically.

Your Feedback

One of the primary objectives of this series was to connect with many more of you in the community and share ideas and innovations about everyone’s efforts at building factories today.

We have received a small number of comments to this series so far, which we have been keen to discuss at length, and hope we have done a good job at answering the questions appropriately. Hopefully, there are many more of you out there building factories, or at least considering building them, and so we hope to hear more from all of you on that. Please drop us a comment on the appropriate post and we will work hard to get you an answer you will find useful.

If we are doing a good job please let us know. If we are doing a poor job and you don’t like the guidance we are giving please let us know that also. This should shape any future guidance we give the community in this space, and at least we can start further discussions with those of you in this space. Hopefully, we will also get a feel for just how many of you are out there are in this space.

The Final Say

There should now be a little more information out there to help you build a software factory right now on the Microsoft platform with the current toolsets. This series was created exactly for that purpose to share with you the experiences we have had in building factories and give you insights into the issues we have faced on this road already.

As more and more people jump into this space we expect to see from the community more detailed, formal guidance on this subject, so that the community as a whole can learn from previous experiences and elevate the adoption and the application of software factories to real world projects.

After all we think that the act of building a software factory should leverage the tenants that software factories promote themselves, i.e.

“Package domain expertise and guidance in a form that others can re-use and manipulate to create solutions using simplified descriptions of the problem at hand.”

Hopefully we have done a good job of that for you, and hopefully you will consider the experiences we have shared in this series in your factory building efforts.

Come see us...

We are proud to announce that we will be presenting a session on ‘Building Your Own Software Factory’ (ARC303) at Tech-Ed 2007 in June this year.

The 300 level session will contain material from this series and demos and examples of other factories to explain the concepts. We would love to meet up with you there and answer your factory building questions.

Many Thanks, Jezz Santos and Edward Bakker