SoftwareFactories
ThoughtStorms Wiki
Context : BEACH
What are software factories? (Read with SoftwareSupplyChain)
Microsoft blurb : Software Factories provide a faster, less expensive and more reliable approach to application development by significantly increasing the level of automation in application development, applying the time tested pattern of using visual languages to enable rapid assembly and configuration of framework based components. Software Factories go beyond models as documentation, using highly tuned Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) and the Extensible Markup Language (XML) as source artifacts, to capture life cycle metadata, and to support high fidelity model transformation, code generation and other forms of automation.
Are these basically Wizards for generating standard types of application?
Also :
JonUdell interviewed WardCunningham about them : https://web.archive.org/web/20041126055642/http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/11/22.html
More on this interview on the SoftwareSupplyChain)
(Full MP3 is https://web.archive.org/web/20051027153956/http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/gems/CunninghamGreenfield.mp3)
From the interview :
What a software factory has at it's core is a concept called a SoftwareFactorySchema which is a description of a class of system that ... life-cycle and that defines the various areas of concern and separates those concerns, using what we call viewpoints.
In a nutshell a software factory schema is a network ... of viewpoints. Each viewpoint describes some aspect of building or defining or deploying or maintaining or testing a particular type of system.