A software factory is meant to be capable of providing computer support for the coordinated work of software developers in large software development projects. The term software factory hence denotes a number of things: people and their respective roles in software development; computer supported tools and their combined use in software development; and a co-ordination process model to guide people in their proper use of tools and in their proper joined work integration as depicted below.
Recent developments have led from closed environments, comprising fixed sets of tightly coupled tools for specific phases, to open environments that enable the plugging of new tools as the requirements evolve.
To cope with this new dimension in CASE technology, standards organizations intend to support the effort with reference models;
The concepts presented in this article have been primarily developed in the Eureka Software Factory (ESF) project. This article hence carries the flavor of that project in the way it introduces software factory concepts and in the way it explains these concepts in the larger context of computer-aided software development.
Computer support in a software factory will be provided by a software system that is called factory support environment (FSE). In order to support software development in the manner outlined above, the FSE is needed to provide a number of integration services. FSE integration services will be explained first by introducing a conceptual view of a software factory and later on as an architectural view. The conceptual view, called the software factory core, introduces a number of integration stages: interworking, interaction, interoperation, and interconnection. The architectural view introduces the mechanisms that support integration at the respective stages.
Keywords:
software factory core;
factory construction;
factory evaluation;
kernel K/2;
R principles;
communication semantics