If you’ve been intrigued by Microsoft’s idea of integrating software factories into Visual Studio, you might want to read this mini-series by Edward Bakker and Jezz Santos:

The motivation behind this effort has been that we’ve recognised that there is little practical information helping ordinary professional developers on getting started with building and understanding software factories. We have had quite a head start on this and wanted to share our knowledge and experiences with you and the community to promote the uptake of building factories, which in turn should promote the adoption of software factories and the industrialisation of software in general. This series was created in a format that asks a logical sequence of questions that you might have when trying to figure out how to build software factories today.

Pretty good as a guide for the perplexed. A couple of other links. Jeremy Miller explains why he is sceptical:

The big hangup that I have with software factories is that I think some atrociously bad systems are going to be created by blindly following the “guidance” from the software factory.  Also, *who* is building the guidance in these software factory thingies?  Are they really good enough to do that?  Is my system really suitable for a generic set of patterns?

I also liked the comment to his post which asks about:

Microsoft software which uses the product (other than demo, please):

I’m reminded of when I asked Scott Guthrie what modeling tools were used by the ASP.NET team. His answer: a whiteboard.

Finally, RegDeveloper editor David Norfolk has some comments on UML and MDA arising from the article.