In Part II of our Software Factories article series we want to highlight how
the theory, which we introduced in the first part, translates into practice.
One of the things we found out while working with Software Factories is that
people quickly get a better understanding just by seeing what a factory can
look like. So, now we'll walk you through examples of deliverables for a
Software Factory case study. Detailed examples of these deliverables are also
discussed in our book Practical Software Factories in .NET, which gives a
complete Software Factory case study.
Figure 1 is an overview of the four high-level deliverables of our case study
Software Factory, including their contained work products. It closely follows
the concepts as they were originally described by Jack Greenfield and Keith
Short in their book, defining the Software Factory schema and template as
m... (more)
There is a lot of commotion and hope around Software Factories in the
community today, which was originally sparked by the Software Factories book
of Jack Greenfield and Keith Short. The promise is that Software Factories
will streamline and automate software development to become more efficient
and produce higher quality software. However, at the same time there is a lot
of confusion about what Software Factories really are and how to implement
them.
In the first part of our Software Factory series we start with working out
the problems we face in software development today, wh... (more)
Have you ever been on a project where software development worked beautifully
but developing and maintaining the database always caused unexpected problems
and bugs? Do your changes constantly get overwritten by other developers, or
is only one person at a time allowed to make changes? Do you find, after two
or three major releases, that it's impossible to create upgrade scripts for
existing production databases? After experiencing these frustrations and
more, I decided to address them.
In this article, I will take a close look at the problems that many software
projects face wi... (more)