Building Software Factories Today

Software factories is an elusive concept nowadays. In this article, I will try to help you understand which technologies can be used today to build production-quality factories and the reasons for the perceived inconsistency in the tools and the vision on Microsoft's part.

None of what follows is speculation: I've been a main developer on one of the two core technologies that realize today' software factories (patterns & practices Guidance Automation Toolkit or GAT), and as such I've been in close contact with the teams and architects building the technologies I will explain here (including Jack Greenfield, Wojtek Kozaczynski, Mauro Regio and others). Also, my company is a leader in software factory development, providing most of the people that build the factories coming out of the most active practitioner in the area today: the Microsoft patterns & practices group. We also have several customers around the world that we helped reap the amazing productivity boost that today's factory tools can bring.

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