Software Factories: Assembling Applications with Patterns, Models, Frameworks, and Tools (Paperback)

~ (Author), Keith Short (Author), Steve Cook (Author), Stuart Kent (Author), John Crupi (Foreword) "According to the Standish Group, businesses in the United States spend about $250 billion annually on software development, with the cost of the average project..." (more)
Key Phrases: factory schema, domain feature model, common solution features, Microsoft Visual Studio, Check Credit, Visual Basic (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

The architects of the Software Factories method provide a detailed look at this faster, less expensive, and more reliable approach to application development. Software Factories significantly increase the level of automation in application development at medium to large companies, applying the time tested pattern of using visual languages to enable rapid assembly and configuration of framework based components.Unlike other approaches to Model Driven Development (MDD), such as Model Driven Architecture (MDA) from the Object Management Group (OMG), Software Factories do not use the Unified Modeling Language (UML), a general purpose modeling language designed for models used as documentation. They go beyond models as documentation, using models based on highly tuned Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) and the Extensible Markup Language (XML) as source artifacts, to capture life cycle metadata, and to support high fidelity model transformation, code generation and other forms of automation.

Building business applications is currently an extremely labor-intensive process that relies on a limited pool of highly talented developers. As global demand for software exceeds the capacity of this labor pool, current software development methods will be replaced by automated methods, meaning cheaper, faster, and more reliable application development. Wiley Computer Publishing has teamed with industry experts Jack Greenfield and Keith Short, both architects in the Enterprise Frameworks and Tools group at Microsoft, and leading authorities on Model Driven Development (MDD), to help technical professionals understand how business application development is changing. With two chapters on Domain Specific Language (DSL) development by contributors Steve Cook and Stuart Kent, they take an in-depth look at challenges facing developers using current methods and practices, and critical innovations that can help with these challenges, such as Pattern Automation, Generative Programming, Software Product Lines, Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP), Component Based Development (CBD), Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), Service Orchestration and Web Service Integration. They then propose the Software Factories method, which has the potential to significantly change software development practice, by reducing the cost of building reusable assets, such as patterns, languages, frameworks and tools, for specific problem domains, and then applying them to accelerate the assembly of applications in those domains.

After introducing Software Factories, the book describes these key enabling technologies in depth, and shows how they can be integrated and applied to support a form of Rapid Application Development (RAD). It then provides a detailed example of a working Software Factory and answers Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs). Readers will gain a better understanding of these technologies, and will learn how to apply them to implement Software Factories within their own organizations.

From the Back Cover

"Software Factories does a wonderful job integrating modeling with patterns, frameworks, and agile development. The authors provide a compelling look at how a new generation of tools will make this a reality. A must read for software architects and developers."
—John Crupi, Sun Distinguished Engineer, and coauthor, Core J2EE Patterns

Many of the challenges currently facing software developers are symptoms of problems with software development practices. Software Factories solves these problems by integrating critical innovations that have been proven over the last ten years but have not yet been brought together.

A team of industry experts led by Jack Greenfield explains that a Software Factory is a configuration of languages, patterns, frameworks, and tools that can be used to rapidly and cost-effectively produce an open-ended set of unique variants of a standard product.

Their ground-breaking methodology promises to industrialize software development, first by automating software development within individual organizations, and then by connecting these processes across organizational boundaries to form supply chains that distribute cost and risk. Featuring an example introduced in the first chapter and revisited throughout the book, the authors explain such topics as:

• Chronic problems that object orientation has not been able to overcome, and critical innovations that solve them
• How models can become first class software development artifacts, not just documentation
• How software product lines can be used to consistently achieve commercially significant levels of reuse
• How patterns, frameworks, tools, and other reusable assets can be used to scale up agile development methods
• How orchestration and other adaptive mechanisms can be used to enable development by assembly

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Product Details

• Paperback: 500 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1st edition (August 16, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471202843
• ISBN-13: 978-0471202844
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #211,211 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

60 of 75 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Thorough, academic overview of Software Factories, April 6, 2005

By	Billy McCafferty (Denver, CO United States) - See all my reviews

30 second summary of the book:
- Software development is awfully inefficient. Most of the applications we write have more similarities than differences, yet we build every project from the ground up.
- UML is great for communicating on a white board but fails with respect to bridging the gap between requirements and code. The limitations of present-day CASE tools shows this inefficiency.
- Innovations such as the maturation of domain-specific languages (DSL), at varying levels of abstraction, and the support of these languages through IDEs are needed to make the next step in software development.
- These innovations will provide the key to creating product lines built on reusable processes and software frameworks: software factories. The adoption of this approach will lead to automated development, faster delivery time, systematic reuse, less testing, and greater maintainability.

5 second summary of the book:
Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Team System is going to be really really cool.

The good:
Greenfield gives a very thorough (600 pg) introduction to the software factories approach to solution development. He presents a convincing case describing current deficiencies in the world of software development, how domain-specific languages and more advanced IDEs will correct these deficiencies, and what challenges remain between us and realizing the goal of having a true software factory.

The bad:
This book should not be seen as a technical how-to book. Do not expect to be able to apply much of what he describes within your software development routine...unless, of course, you're designing a next generation IDE. This book takes a more academic approach to describing the theory behind software factories. In the near future, when Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 is available, Chapter 16, "A Software Factory Example," may become useful as a reference as it presents a good example of applying the approach to the project life-cycle. But until then, the material is not very practical, due to the fact that no IDE currently supports the ideas that he has presented. But even after Visual Studio 2005 becomes available, you probably won't open this book too much after the first read through.

The hype:
There has been a lot of buzz online surrounding the software factories approach to development. Once we're able to try out the approach within VS 2005 Team System, we'll all be able to decide if this is going to be the next wave of development or just another neat idea. As for me, Greenfield has me convinced that this is certainly a step in the right direction.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Scholarly and sophisticated, March 23, 2005

By	W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

The authors present a massive and sophisticated approach to understanding and integrating patterns, models and frameworks into a project. The tone is scholarly, with many references to important previous papers and texts. The book is targeted at developers and senior programmers. Much of it deals with the different levels of abstraction, and how you move between these. So that if you have designed a project using patterns, then this is a high level structure. The book offers aid in migrating this into a framework, which might be considered a reification of the patterns.

An extensive survey is also given of various design/modelling tools that are available. These might be open source, proprietary or of the academic research type. One easy thing you can do with this book is to use its analysis of these tools. This is doable without having to wade through most of the rest of the book.

The book will not be an easy read to some. A lot of material is covered and a considerable amount is fairly abstract. Without significant prior experience in design and coding, you may miss the full meanings and appreciation of much of the text.

It makes a typical computer book look trivial.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exceptional reasoning on software construction, January 9, 2007

By	A Reader (USA) - See all my reviews

Wow! I bought this book a long time ago and it lived on my "bibliophile" stack of bought but unread gems. It's a stunning book if you seek to understand the decomposition of complexity in modern software applications and the complex deployment architectures they work in. My only concern is the book is not an engineering book - there are no mathematical models of scale and performance for distributed decompositions. It has a excellent description of aspect oriented programming which I learned from. The authors could also benefit if they discovered the ideas in Carliss Baldwin's superlative "Design Rules" book and brought those ideas into their own discussion of the software construction domain. This is a WONDERFUL book for enterprise architects.