Software Factories

Now this is interesting. Jack Greenfield and Keith Short take on the future of software development:

Total global demand for software will grow by an order of magnitude over the next decade, driven by new forces in the global economy like the growing role of software in social infrastructure, by new application types like business integration and medical informatics, and by new platform technologies like web services, mobile devices and smart appliances. Without comparable increases in productivity, total software development capacity seems destined to fall far short of total demand by the end of the decade. What will change to provide the massive increase in capacity required to meet demand? It is not likely to come from adding developers. Instead, software development methods and practices will have to change dramatically to make developers much more productive.

Read the whole article here.

Martin Fowler has a whole essay on this topic: Language Workbenches: The Killer-App for Domain Specific Languages?

Most new ideas in software developments are really new variations on old ideas. This article describes one of these, the growing idea of a class of tools that I call Language Workbenches - examples of which include Intentional Software, JetBrains's Meta Programming System, and Microsoft's Software Factories. These tools take an old style of development - which I call language oriented programming and use IDE tooling in a bid to make language oriented programming a viable approach. Although I'm not enough of a prognosticator to say whether they will succeed in their ambition, I do think that these tools are some of the most interesting things on the horizon of software development. Interesting enough to write this essay to try to explain, at least in outline, how they work and the main issues around their future usefulness.

And to round out the discussion Neil Davidson responds to Steve Cook with this insightful comment:

As much as I find the technical side interesting, the thing which really fascinates me is how the way people write software will change in the future. ... I've been thinking about it a bit, and I think that although the analogy with the changes in industrial manufacturing (from craftsman to mass production to mass customization) is interesting, I'm not sure it really holds true.

I think one of the key things you mentioned was the analogy to the supply chain, and how this chain will lengthen. The way I see it, software will always need a craftsman at one end. Software is intrinsically hard to do, and requires people, or teams of people, to think very carefully and deeply about what they're doing. The tools, processes and components they use will have to change though - it is at this point in the supply chain that I can see mass production happening. I think the analogy is that you're always going to need craftsmen like carpenters and bricklayers to build a house, but the tools, techniques and materials they use will be mass produced. At the moment we're at the stage where the bricklayer makes his own bricks, and the carpenter cuts his own trees down. I don't think the craftsman will be replaced, but the tools he uses will be provided by companies who provide (or are) software factories. That's the point I was trying to make about a few companies dominating the market - somebody will discover that they can produce an e-commerce software factory and sell hundreds of thousands of the things at $1,000 a piece rather than two or three a year at $100,000 a go (because it's no longer a problem constrained by people's time). Presumably Microsoft believes it will be them and that's possibly part of the reason why they're entering the CRM, accounting and business markets.

Does Apple see any of this? Do they think it all too distant to consider currently? Either way, what an interesting time to be developing software!