In this post, Paul Gielens mentions the article ”Design and Implement a Software Factory” published with the new issue of the Architecture Journal magazine.

The article describes Microsoft’s progress in developing a proof of concept of a factory in the healthcare domain. It is definitely worth a read, particularly if you are (as I am) struggling to find a real, or at least realistic, example of a factory schema.

On a related note, you might have missed Ron Jacobs’ ArcTalk interview to Jack Greenfield and Mauro Regio on the very same subject; the interview serves as an introduction to the HL7 project and to the whole concept of a software factory.
Towards the end of the talk, Mauro gives some comments about the perceived loss of developer creativity that switching to a more “industrialized” process seem to imply. Well, I totally share his view that creativity is not gone at all, but simply repurposed to solve new and more interesting problems.

A while ago, I showed to my team an early prototype of a very simple domain-specific language that I wrote which will be part of a product line that we are building.
To be honest, there wasn’t much to it; after the quick demo, however, one of the previously skeptical developers looked at me with evident surprise and said:
“Claudio, now I finally get it! You are going to remove the boring parts of my job”.
Yes I am, buddy… yes I am :-).