Software Factory Template: Application Core Assets

Summary

In this chapter, we gave an introduction of how to harvest and implement some of the core assets required by the ISpySoft Software Factory in the course of actual product development. The activities that we performed, the work products that we built, and the reusable assets that we derived from these work products are all specified by the Software Factory schema.

We further demonstrated how SCSF provides a very flexible infrastructure framework for product line development. Regarding the architectural constraints imposed by using SCSF, developer guidance and automation in the form of GAT recipes greatly facilitated a good part of the recurring steps such as creating an initial solution structure or adding views. For now we used SCSF out of the box for the purpose of implementing some of the core assets. In the next chapter, we will truly consume SCSF, customize it, and make it an integral part of our Software Factory template.

Of course, there are lots of other core assets that need to be created in the course of our factory (such as the premium web services hosted centrally at ISpySoft). However, we felt demonstrating a thin slice of product development together with extraction of reusable assets and prototypical work products was most important in order to show how the Software Factory template can be built incrementally while providing real value as soon as possible.