Shifting economies: From craft production to flexible systems and software factories

Abstract This article discusses the evolution of production systems from craft or job shops to conventional mass production and then to flexible design and production systems. The major argument is that factory systems and technologies have been evolving in two directions: First, they have become more versatile in the variety of products they can produce, resulting from innovations in production and design technology as well as management techniques. Second, companies have extended factory-like tools and techniques backward toward design operations, gradually bringing more discipline, automation, and thus efficiency into the realm of engineering work, including the relatively new field of computer programming. The result, in both manufacturing and design, has been a shift from simple scale economies, as in conventional mass production, to scope economies - efficiencies gained in the design and production of multiple products. An examination of how flexible-factory tools and techniques have been applied in large-scale software development illustrates these trends.

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