Industrializing software development: The "factory automation" way

Abstract

Improving the productivity by means of systematic reuse has been a major challenge particularly for the last decade in software industry. Following the individual techniques like Architecture-Based Development, Model-Driven Development and Software Product Lines, Software Factories have eventually come to the stage as an umbrella solution to software productivity problem by assembling the applications with frameworks, patterns, models and tools. While this theoretically seems quite suitable, it still needs practical guidance at certain points such as defining and orchestrating reusable assets for setting up distinct software factories. This paper proposes a methodical way for such difficulties in establishing software factories as the way other manufacturing industries have been doing for several decades, which is known to be "factory automation". We articulate the "software factory automation" for managing reusable assets across distinct software product lines based on an architecture-driven software factory meta-model and tailoring them to form directly executable software assets. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.