Hackers As Factory Workers?

DevDude writes "A strangely interesting article is running on MSDN, entitled: The Case for Software Factories. It suggests creating 'development environments configured to support the rapid development of a specific type of application.' As a developer thrust into many an unsavory situation, I am constantly stepping in the remnants of some development methodology or other. Will super-specialization of software development teams help the industry to push out better software faster? Or are we hassled enough without being treated as an assembly line?"

Comments

Assembly Line?

[Anonymous Coward]

If we wont conform to an "Assembly Line" mentality they will probably just outsource it to another country.

Think Peoplesoft, Oracle, etc.

[Animats]

This makes sense for companies that sell slightly customized versions of their packages. That really is an assembly line operation.

it's a typo

[n3k5]

200 projects sounds extremely low

There's a reference to the source of this number right in there, why don't you just have a look at it? In the original paper, you find:

"In the United States, we spend more than $250 billion each year on IT application development of approximately 175,000 projects."

I RTFAed: Empty Gibberish.

[jjohnson]

It's "10 printed pages" of Business 2.0 cliches that was probably lifted out of some dot-commies VC proposal:

One way to do this is to give developers ways to encapsulate their knowledge as reusable assets that others can apply. Is this far fetched? Patterns already demonstrate limited but effective knowledge reuse. The next step is to move from documentation to automation, using languages, frameworks, and tools to automate pattern application.

This is about the most concrete sentence I found, and it ain't all that concrete, besides simply repeating the same mantras we've been hearing for the last decade or so: code reuse is good, frameworks increase efficiency, design patterns are distilled knowledge... There's a bland and unhelpful, not to mention trite, rejection of comparing software development to the production of physical goods in manufacturing.

Don't bother wading through it. It's tripe.

Re:Yeah, right.

[Javagator]

Software development is a funny occupation. Almost any reasonably intelligent person can do it, but very few people can do it well. The very best programmers write code faster, with fewer bugs, the code is more maintainable, and has more re-usable components. A lot of people believe that if you hire average programmers and use the correct process, you get superior code. That's just not true. The quality of the code depends on the quality of the programmers (assuming a management that stays out of the way).

Re:Around it comes again

[crmartin]

This is the place to pull out Fred Brooks' paper "No Silver Bullet", which makes that point.

Twenty years ago.

Sometimes I think I should have been an English major.