Software Factories

I have been reading a bit about software factories, and also recently attended a presentation by Jack Greenfield (author of Software Factories: Assembling Applications with Patterns, Models, and Tools). Many interesting ideas.

The first thing to keep in mind, is that there is a war going on. The combatants are familiar: Microsoft and a few friends on one side, eveybody else on the other. As somebody once said, "the first casualty of war is truth".

One of the main principles of the software factory idea from Microsoft is that of "Domain Specific Languages". Fankly I am having trouble accepting the idea as useful for large scale developments in large development shops. I can see how it might work well with a team of A-Team programmers. But when dealing with 9-5 programmers - those with lives away from programming, I think having a dozen DSLs within the organization will be too much to handle. These DSLs will be on top of the general programming languages we already have. At least for the next 10 years. The average Joe doesn't want to learn that much.

On the other hand, I can see the counter argument. As Grady Booch points out, " In many cases, the semantics of the UML are pretty close to what you need" (December 3, 2004), UML is not exactly what you need - just close. There is often an impendance mismatch - which means you lose power, perhaps introducing distortion. The DSL approach says create exatcly what you need and use that - the mismatch is avoided.

The difficulty I have with that is that it may just be moving the problem. Now the programmer has to deal with a dozen different interfaces (DSLs). Is the programmer more likely to make a mistake in the coding? Would there be 'Whoops - that would have been the way to code it using DSL#34, but in DSL#93 it is done this way, becuase of what we learned when we used to use DSL#67. "

Grady also said, "we do disagree with Microsoft's rejection of the UML in favor of proprietary domain-specific languages". At first is wondered from where he pulled the word "proprietary". That word to me usually implies 'closed', 'owned', 'not generally available'. I thought these DSLs could be open, public, generally available. But then when I consider the number of them that could exist, I realized that proprietary is not so wrong.

Enough for now. This Software Factories versus MDD (or MDA) battle will be ongoing for years. I don't either will win, but both will declare victory.