New Software Factories Community Site

I am a bit tardy on the blogs about this, but if you haven't heard yet - we recently opened a new site dedicated to building and sharing a community of knowledge around Software Factories.

https://sf.devrevolution.com/

Huge thanks to Martin Danner who has hosted the site for us, and Edward Bakker who has championed the creation of the community. For some time we have aimed to provide a central place online we, as a community, can collect, discuss, rank, comment and order content about factories and Visual Studio Extensibility as this methodology gains momentum.

There is a mother site to this one (DevRevolution) which aims to address other industry topics such as Agile Development and Application Lifecycle Management as revolutions to the software development industry. However we are starting of humbly primarily focusing our attention on software factories at present. [Which just quietly, I see as an evolution not necessarily a full revolution to how we build some types of software - anyhow]

There are many sites and resources on the web about and around software factories from many of the great folks who have pioneered this space before, and heaps of information about its fundamental technologies and practices (i.e. domain modeling, automation, generative programming etc.) so we wanted to provide a central place to bring this knowledge together and have you guys - the community - view it all in one place. The idea is to then have the community collate, rate, comment and sort the content so that anyone visiting the site can find the most relevant content to consume based upon there understanding of this space. Clearly, no one wants to trawl hundreds of disparate links to sources of info to mine and find the best or the highest quality information on this topic. So having the community rank, comment and direct the visitors to the best content is an important attribute. So this is our primary goal - to enable that. We also want a place for people to come to and feel part of a larger industry group of like minded folks practicing this methodology developing its tools and practices.

We are currently a little centered on Visual Studio Extensibility as the platform for software factories at present simply because Microsoft is leading the Software Factories initiative at present, but we would like to think that the concepts and practices are not necessarily exclusive to Microsoft technologies, and would like to support ideas from other platforms and technologies in the industry.

Of course we realize that much of the relevant content out there for consumption is addressable only in the heads of many of the people involved in and around the factories initiative. We have linked some resources (as you can see), but we are relying on you to add whatever resources you are aware of.

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We are focusing on refining the site and providing improved means (over what you see there now) to provide a better user experience and means to better add, rank, comment and sort the content best. Basically we are aiming to have each piece of content referenced on the site to support attributes, comments, ratings and categorization.

Currently the modules we have are a step in that direction, some parts allow this capability, others don't. So we have much work to do to reach that goal. It's a little ambitious for us, but we recognize that others are reaching out for such as resource.

However, we still need more content and feedback to help drive that.

Please have a look and let us know if you think this is useful, what is missing and how it should work to be the tool this evolving community will treasure.

[If you visit the site, and don't submit any content or offer any honest constructive feedback, then I hope you leave feeling guilty that you have not really participated in bettering the community as a whole - we especially need and value your comments and feedback.]

Some links: