MSDN has (finally) published the first part of our series on "Building Software Factories" on MSDN.

Just a little worried that some of this content is now a little out of date considering we wrote it more than 6 months ago based upon our blog series Building Software Factories - Factories 201. However, the up coming parts of the series will be more up to date with recent experiences and perspectives evolving as the products and processes from Microsoft are.

This is just the first part of the 3 part "Building Software Factories" series, which goes:

1. What are we building and why?
   • Describes what a factory is in concrete terms, what it means and takes to build a factory and why we want to do that
2. What's going to take?
   • Tackles the critical issues of getting your organization’s management bought into a software factories approach, and what your organization needs to do to support the development of factories to give it a good chance to succeed.
3. How are we going to do that?
   • Addresses directly how to build software factories on the existing Microsoft platform, which tools, processes and practices to use to develop and release your factories, and how to get started.

Stay tuned for the later parts in this series.

We also have another series on factories coming soon called 'Packaging and Building Software Factories" which tackles creating installers and team builds using Team Foundation Server. We will announce these articles when published soon separately.