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| Birth of the software factory |
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| BY PAUL VECCHIATTO, ITWEB CAPE TOWN CORRESPONDENT |
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| [Cape Town | ITWeb, 23 February 2005] -
The current models for developing software are inefficient and should be replaced by the “software factory” concept, which uses common characteristics to speed up development and implementation, says Microsoft.This emerged this week during a three-city tour by Microsoft representatives to promote the concept of software factories. The tour featured Arvinder Sehmi, lead architect: developer and platform group EMEA, along with two local Microsoft representatives, Danny Naidoo, director: development group, and Gavin Warrener, platform strategy adviser.The software factory concept was first mooted in US academic circles during the 1990s and Microsoft is actively pursuing the idea with its Visual Studio .Net programming environment forming the backbone of the strategy.“What we are seeing is the industrialisation of software development. It is the next logical step,” Sehmi told ITWeb.Sehmi says many applications share common themes. “For instance, patient healthcare systems, online trading applications, and other such systems share common characteristics and these can be shared among a number of different customer-specific systems that can be added to as a means of increasing complexity.”According to Sehmi, software factories provide a faster, less expensive and more reliable approach to application development than other models by increasing the level of automation by applying the pattern of using visual languages to enable rapid assembly and configuration of framework-based components.A discussion paper on the Microsoft.com Web site says that in the US only 16% of software projects finish on schedule and within budget. Another 31% are cancelled, mainly due to quality problems, for losses of about $81 billion. Another 53% exceed their budgets by an average of 189%, for losses of about $59 billion. Projects reaching completion deliver an average of only 42% of the originally planned features.Microsoft argues that software development has failed to move with the times and not much progress has been made in achieving greater efficiency.“The software factory idea is still in its early days. But we have received some good response from the architects and developers and eventually it will take off,” Semhi says.
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