A time for reflection and assessment
Wow, it's hard to believe it has been almost a year since the patterns & practices team released our first software factories. Remember when the early customer previews were called Baseline Architecture Toolkits? Oh, the nostalgia :) We could have had so much fun with the BAT acronym ... haha.
So that means now is a perfect time to take a quick assessment on how we're doing so far ... that's right, a survey. Now hold on a second! At least hear me out for the rest of the paragraph. I can't devulge too much detail yet, but some team in Microsoft might be in the middle of building some serious software factory infrastructure for a future version of Visual Studio - that's right, much better than GAX and DSL tools. Do you want it to suck? Do you think software factories are just a pipe dream and would rather they build something else? If you're thinking, "Oh no Don, I like software factories, especially the Service Factory (okay, I'm embellishing - haha)," then I would ask you to keep reading. I promise we've tried to optimize the survey to allow you the highest level of impact in the least amount of time possible.
Whew, you're still reading ... excellent! Okay, so you're only looking at 9 generic questions and 9 questions for each software factory you've evaluated/used. This survey covers the 4 factories released by p&p (web service, smart client, web client, and mobile client). The first 8 questions will take no more than a minute or two. The 9 questions for each factory shouldn't take more than 10 minutes each and you will only see the questions for the factories you choose. The last question is an anything-else-you-want-to-share question - you can take as long as you want on it. That's it ... super quick-n-easy.
Here is the URL you need to take the survey: http://www.zoomerang.com/survey.zgi?p=WEB2266YYVWSKP
We're really looking forward to your feedback so we can help the future include some truly kick-ass factories.
