I recently published an article on using software factories in supply chains for Methods and Tools . Also, many people have asked about the article I wrote about factories vs. MDA for the Perspectives of the IASA.

Irfan Idrees wrote with the observation that while performance analysis and prediction are of critical importance for software developers, the rigorous approaches prevalent in the marketplace have not been widely accepted in the community. Irfan then asked how software factories deal with this issue. Software factories provide leverage by reducing the amount of variability in application development. With a software factory, one effectively builds a variant of a known application type. All features

In the software factories book , we explain that systematic reuse is effective, but ad hoc reuse is not. Ad hoc reuse is the “Field of Dreams” approach… “If we build it, they will come”. Great line for a movie, but it doesn’t work well in the real world of software development. Systematic reuse relies on the recognition that every component embodies many assumptions about functional requirements, technology choices, operational requirements, architecture, deployment topology, testing strategy, development

Here’s an update about Software Factories on ARCast , the podcast series on the Architecture Resource Center . Last month, five panelists (counting myself) recorded three shows on model driven development. It's been quite successful, with the largest number of downloads to date in the series. You can find the first show here, the second one here and the third one here . Following up the panel discussion, Martin Danner and I did another podcast on MDA vs. Software Factories . I also joined Mauro Regio

This is a response to a blog posting by Tad Anderson, and the pointer to it on the MSDN Architecture General forum. First, I agree with your observation, Tad, about the lack of support for the Software Architect in VSTS 2005. We did indeed focus on the System Architect not the Software Architect. We had limited resources to allocate to architecture tools, and felt it was more important to support Microsoft’s drive toward connected systems for the 2005 release. As you suggest, however, we do intend

Keith Short , Mauro Regio and I have agreed to write a new book called Software Factories Applied. Our goal is to write a short book for practitioners that complements the theoretical foundation established in the original Software Factories book by showing how to build a software factory using currently available technologies, namely the DSL tools , the Guidance Automation Toolkit and Visual Studio 2005 Team System . A key topic covered in the book will be how to build a software factory schema,

Keith Short has already written a post that provides an overview our activities at OOPSLA 2005 . Here is a compendium of my activities at the conference. On Sunday, 10/16, I hosted a full day tutorial on Software Factories with Steve Cook . On Monday, 10/17, Steve and I hosted a full day workshop on Software Factories. The workshop announcement and proceedings are posted here . On Tuesday, 10/18, I spoke on a panel called Aspects – Passing Fad or New Foundation with Dave Thomas , Gregor Kiczales

In this posting, I continue addressing issues in the recent blog posting by Grady Booch . As I noted in my previous posting , the debate up to this point has been about the suitability of the Unified Modeling Language (UML) as a medium for model driven development. However, that is not really the question we should be debating. Instead of asking whether or not we should use our existing hammer (i.e., UML) to hit everything in sight, even things that don't look like nails, we should be asking what

Two weeks ago, Grady Booch posted a blog entry titled “Microsoft and Domain Specific Languages”. The posting is part of a running debate between Grady, and my colleagues at Microsoft Steve Cook and Alan Wills . While there are several points in the posting on which Grady and I disagree, which I will address over the course of the next few postings, there are also several points on which we agree. In particular, we share the conviction that packaging knowledge for reuse in patterns, languages, frameworks,