The software infrastructure for a distributed system factory

This paper describes an innovative approach to the construction, application and deployment of software factories. Based on experience in creating and evolving the System Factory project at USC, we present a new experimental project, whose technological and organisational objectives are wide-ranging. This effort is called the Distributed System Factory (DSF) project. The DSF project is intended to provide a software infrastructure suitable for engineering large-scale software systems with dispersed teams working over wide-area networks. This software infrastructure is the central focus of this paper. As such, this paper describes the information structures that can be used to model and create the infrastructure, as well as target software applications. It also describes an electronic market-place of logically centralised software services which populate and execute within this infrastructure. Finally, it describes a brief view of how the DSF project can grow to accommodate academic and industrial research groups.