Oslo and Software Factories

I’ve had a few people ask me about the connection between the Microsoft Software Factories initiative and Oslo. First, the SF initiative is alive and well and a good summary of the current state appears here. I just had a demo from Jack Greenfield’s DPE team of the new Blueprint technology which is very exciting and I think will be the basis for renewed attention to the ideas around software factories we first described in the book.

Since Oslo is a technology platform addressing a way to improve development using frameworks, DSL’s and models you’d expect us also to be considering the other limb of the software factory idea – guidance and development process. You’d be right. I can’t say at this stage when we’ll be able to deliver Oslo bits that support something akin to the Blueprint concepts, but the attraction of being able to store the guidance metadata in the repository is very strong. Since a software factory schema is a schema of all the information, tools, DSLs and other resources and processes required to build a family of like applications (a family having similar core architectural features and patterns), using the repository as the store and advising a Quadrant developer using an embedded guidance framework would be very cool.