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March 28, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Software Factories touted

TAGS: Application Development

Microsoft's Software Factories and Domain-Specific Language (DSL) technologies were touted as medicine for what ails software development, by a presenter at the VSLive conference on Wednesday.

During the presentation, Kevin McNeish, president of Oak Leaf Enterprises and a Microsoft MVP, offered statistics such as one that states only 16 percent of US software projects are completed on time and within budget. Meanwhile, 31 percent of projects are canceled due to quality problems, creating losses of $81 billion, McNeish said.

"Lots of folks are choosing outsourcing as an option," he said. And this is being done because "software development in the US as we know it is a failure in many different ways," said McNeish.

Developers, he said, must cope with issues such as rapidly evolving platform technologies, increasing customer expectations and, simply, too much technology to deal with. Most software is developed by hand from scratch, which is slow and expensive.

Meanwhile, there is a shortage of .Net developers.

Unified Modeling Language documentation is prone to obsolescene, McNeish said. Agile programming, which relies on harvesting the practices of a few of the most productive developers, also does not fully solve the problems of software development.

Microsoft's Software Factories concept, however, provides a configuration of languages, patterns, frameworks and tools that can be used to rapidly build an open-ended set of unique variants of software products, according to McNeish.

Benefits include a high degree of reuse, a uniform architecture and automation of error-prone and tedious tasks, he said. Developers also can work at a higher level of abstraction.

"Software Factories is where Microsoft is headed," McNeish said. Software Factories exist such as a Web Service and Smart Client Software Factories.

An audience member said he expects to use Software Factories.

"We can see [where] the direction of everything is headed and everything is going toward doing things more visually," with drag-and-drop, said Jason Mesches, software engineering manager with IBS Interprit.

In addition to Software Factories, DSL tools enable development of domain-specific diagrams for generating code. Users, for example, can create forms using DSL capabilities in Windows Forms, said McNeish.

Posted by Paul Krill on March 28, 2007 02:30 PM

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