Agile Process Improvement and the Evolution toward Software Factories

The concept of software factories is becoming a hot topic in software engineering circles. So, how can the factory model fit with Agile development practices? Damon Carr makes the case that Agile development is a stepping stone-not an alternative-to software factories. This is not the dreary vision of mindless workers in a factory. Instead, think of highly skilled individuals working with multi-million dollar machinery to develop systems. Even if you are not considering the factory model, Damon offers new practices that can reduce overall Agile development costs by as much as 40 percent. These include explicit refactoring to design patterns in your iterations, quantitative risk management, metrics for understanding the health of your project, and a new approach to team structure.