Is there a Business Case for Software Factories?

Why software factories? This is a question that I frequently get asked  when introducing the Software Factories paradigm. While it seems obvious that increased reuse, higher level of abstraction, and increased automation provide advantages to today's text-based software-development efforts, it is not enough to justify the necessary upfront investment to upper management and other stakeholders. Therefore, we started to look for quantitative data that would clearly show the business case for using this paradigm.

In the msdn article Business Case For Software Factories Christoph Wienands and I wrote, we are showing the quantitative results of a software factories project we did. Even with very limited investment of time and effort we achieved a very compelling business case. Below is the result for our Software Factory implementation. You can see that the break even point for this particular Software Factory is ~8 products (with the product team planning to deliver ~20 products using the factory).

Check out the article on MSDN and I will continue this discussion in my next post.....

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