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About Software Factories

As you might know Belgium is a very small country and so we’ve got only one, truly Belgian, car constructor. They build one sole model, the Gillet Vertigo, of which they’ve sold about 25 in the past 12 years. Assembled by a rather small team of about 18 people each and every of these babies are beautiful examples of excellent craftsmanship. I think you can imagine that these cars are not destined to be owned by a mere mortal like you and me; we drive along in cheaper copies of a mainstream model and brand. E.g. Volkswagen spit out 5.243 million cars in 2005 (Group sales). I agree that probably both companies have a slightly different business plan. J My point however is that while it’s clear you cannot expect a work shop like Gillet’s to produce as much cars as e.g. Volkswagen, the difference in amount of employees is not the only factor. I can tell you scaling up in personnel and setting up extra work shops just won’t cut it. You’ll need a different toolset, new ways of having your personnel collaborate and you’ll have to automate as much as you can if you want to ramp up production, shorten time to market and cut in building costs while keeping the quality of your output within certain predictable and acceptable boundaries. If you’d want to express this approach using as little words as possible, you might consider using the word ‘industrialization’.

Gillet Vertigo

I hope Mr. Gillet won’t hold this against me but speaking in terms we all understand I think he’s a geek. I don’t mean this in a bad way. No matter the cost, this guy just wants to build stuff he’s passionate about without making any concessions whatsoever. If you’ll buy it, you’ll buy it, otherwise you don’t and that’s your loss. I can imagine that to him, what we call normal auto industry, is in fact the Evil Empire. If you make abstraction of the product we deliver, it isn’t hard at all to relate to Mr. Gillet isn’t it? Let’s face it, deep down, we’re all geeks… So maybe that’s why the process of industrializing software development makes some of us feel like turning over to the Dark Side.

For fifteen years I was part of small teams very much like Mr. Gillet’s little work shop, building beautiful software without ever thinking about turning over. The past two years however we’ve been very busy setting up our own Software Factory. Fear not, the Evil One has not yet gotten his hands upon us. Still faithful, we are. And the experience to me has been delightful because in fact, nothing changed. Instead of building software for business customers we’re now building software for development teams. We’re automating automation. So we’re still doing the stuff we are good at and passionate about. On top of that the result is that the development teams are able to ramp up software production. In 2005 we built 3 applications, after setting up the software factory in late 2005, our teams were able to deliver 14 applications in a one year time frame. Of course we ramped up headcount but the factory helped us streamline team output, shorten time to market and cut in building costs. If you want to read more about what constitutes a Software Factory according to Microsoft you can check it out here. Of course they focus on the usage of their tools and I admit I will talk about them too but keep in mind that merely having the toolset doesn’t mean you’ve got a Software Factory at all.

In next posts I will talk about our Software Factory and the different components we think are an inextricable part of it. Expect insights on toolset usage, infrastructural needs, methodology and organizational aspects you need to take into account when setting up your own.

First Post

It took me quite some time before I decided to start up a blog of my own. Plagued by a lot of FUD concerning topics I would cover, impact of written statements visible to anybody walking the surface of this earth (not to mention colleagues), etc… made me somewhat reluctant to kickstart this effort. I’m still not sure what to cover and what not but I hope that all of this will fall into it’s place as soon as I just get started. I suppose spilling some information about who I am and what I do is somewhat obligatory in a first post, so here goes…

My name is Peter Bauwens (which you probably gathered from the URL you used to get here J), I’ll be hitting 40 in about 2 years from now (my young fellow team members keep reminding me of this) and I’ve been working for the IT departement of the same financial institution for almost 17 years now. Been maried for 16, got 4 children (ages 15,13,10,3) and don’t own a company car. God, putting this in writing really makes me feel like a dinosaur….

So far for the bad news, let’s get to the goodies. During those 17 years I’ve been able to work with some nice and cutting edge technology. I managed to stay away from big iron, the obligatory programming languages on it, the restrictions and regulations accompanying them and so forth and so on…. Instead I got to play with Borland’s C++ Builder, several Delphi versions, Visual Basic (shame on me) and Visual Studio 2005 (C#).

The first decade of my career I designed/built applications for online banking targeted at retail clientele. We started out with a fat client application which had an installed user base of about 70.000, and ended with a web based application with about 150.000 active user accounts. In the mean while we also managed to build and maintain online banking applications for the corporate segment.  During this period I moved from development to technical design and over to project lead so I’ve got some experience with all aspects of software development.

About five years ago I moved to a team that builds applications for internal use only. I went back to actually developing software once again. We had a very good time playing around with framework development, code generation, …  At then end of 2005 we finally convinced management to invest in Visual Studio Team System and Agile Development. So the last 2 years I’ve been very busy introducing both in our organization. Because we started out at the end of 2005 using the Beta of Team Foundation Server I think I can say for once in my career we were part of the Early Adopters instead of the Late Majority J

Along with our first .Net applications we managed to design and build a software factory which is currently used to build each and every .Net apllication in our company. Which is 14 of them in the past year and a half , ranging from small ones of approximately 70 manweeks to a big one of about 600 manweeks. 

Since I haven’t been playing around with development tools lately this blog won’t be technical in nature. I suppose you can expect some insights on the configuration, usage and deployment of Team System. We’ve got people in Belgium, Czech Republic and India using the same Team Foundation Server and working on the same projects so probably I’ll do some stuff on distributed development and virtual teams as well.

Some of my collegues have nice blogs about the technical aspects of what we’re doing, you can find them in my blog roll. The only thing left to say is: ‘Happy reading and if I bore you too much, stop visiting this site J)