The "software factory" is a 1968 idea that failed every time anyone tried it. I think that is changing now.
Currently, in my consulting practice with enterprises, I've started talking about "the software factory" as it feels like the right way to encapsulate what my clients are actually looking for. Let me try and unpack what I mean by this below and I would be keen for some feedback.
So, we begin in October 1968, NATO conference at Garmisch. Doug McIlroy presents a paper called "Mass Produced Software Components" arguing we should build software out of prefabricated parts like every other industry does. That's the software factory. People have been chasing it ever since, through CASE tools and RAD and UML round-tripping and low-code, and none of it really took.
The usual explanation is that software isn't manufacturing, every problem is bespoke, no silver bullet, Brooks settled this in 1986. I'm not convinced anymore. I think the factory kept failing because it was aimed at the wrong step. All of those attempts tried to industrialise writing the code, and writing the code was the one part that genuinely needed a person, so you got tools that produced 60% of a codebase and made the other 40% worse to work in.
That constraint is gone. What I keep noticing in organisations is that nothing downstream of it moved. Getting an environment is still a ticket, security review is still a queue, the release board still meets on Thursdays, and four teams who have never met still hand things to each other in a relay. So you get orgs that can produce a working prototype in an afternoon and still need five months to put it in front of a customer.
None of this is a problem for the solo builder, but I see such a huge disparity between that person and the enterprise in terms of speed of end to end delivery now.
Which is the bit I find interesting, because it suggests the old idea might actually work now if you point it one step further down the line. Not generating the code. One front door for every request, one paved road to production that gets certified once and inherited by everything built after it, policy expressed as a gate in the pipeline.
P.s. Video made 100% with Opus 5, Remotion and one of the OpenAI voice APIs to help communicate my thinking.