Rapid Application Development Using Software Factories

Abstract: Software development is still based on manufactory production, and most of the programming code is still hand-crafted. Software development is very far away from the ultimate goal of industrialization in software production, something which has been achieved long time ago in the other industries. The lack of software industrialization creates an inability to cope with fast and frequent changes in user requirements, and causes cost and time inefficiencies during their implementation. Analogous to what other industries had done long time ago, industrialization of software development has been proposed using the concept of software factories. We have accepted this vision about software factories, and developed our own software factory which produces three-layered ASP.NET web applications. In this paper we report about our experience with using this approach in the process of software development, and present comparative results on performances and deliverables in both traditional development and development using software factories.