Last week I’ve given a presentation about Software Factories to my team.  The presentation went well with lot of hot discussion.  I’ve started presentation with the following quote by Peter Wegner:

“Software products are in some respects like tangible products of conventional engineering disciplines such as bridges, buildings, and computers.  But there are also certain important differences that give software development a unique flavor.”

Apart from that I would like to contribute software factory movement.  In this blog I would like to explain all about software factory. Okay, before going to use or implement applications using software factories, in first series, I would like to explain some theoretical concepts behind Software Factory. 

We all believe that software industry is well-matured and we have successful development lifecycle methodology in our hands to develop a successful projects or products.  But, how many of us know that only 16% of the projects are developed on schedule and within budget.  31% are cancelled and 53% exceed their budgets.  As of our experience, we all know that we are releasing a project with spending lot of day and nights in front of our machine and delivered the project with more pain. 

Are we working in right way?  Is our industry always like this?  Are our processes or methodologies standard and matured enough?

Simply we can say only “No” or “May be..”.  What is the problem with us?  If we are not mature, then at least we should learn from other successful industries.  But the big bottleneck is that we cannot follow the other industries, because ours is entirely different than the tangible production industries such as automobile or construction industry.

Our industry gurus invented lot of methodologies and tools over last ten years such object orientation approach, design tools, etc.  But we are not smart like other industry.  They do not spend/waste their time to re-invent the same wheel.  Everything is standard, standard and well automated.  Then what actually we need to say loudly “Software Factory” or “Industrial Approach for Software Development”.  In this blog, I’m going to write series of articles about Software Factory.

In the first part, I'm planned to provide basic details about software factory in a layman's view.

So, please Hold On….!