Christoph Wienands

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)

Software Factories - Part 1

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)

Effective Database Change Management

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)