---
title: "Are Software Factories too complicated to be used in the real world?"
url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2006/5/16/are-software-factories-too-complicated-to-be-used-in-the-rea.md"
canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2006/5/16/are-software-factories-too-complicated-to-be-used-in-the-rea.html"
published: "2006-05-16T11:05:00"
updated: "2006-05-16T11:05:00"
tags: []
author: "Roy Osherove"
description: "Continuing this thought , one of the more interesting answers that came up at teh TechEd Architecture panel by Guy Ron is that the Software Factories initiative is most likely to fail from the evidence thus far. He…"
usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)."
license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
---

# Are Software Factories too complicated to be used in the real world?

By Roy Osherove May 16, 2006

**Historical article** · Originally published May 16, 2006; technical details may be outdated.

Continuing [this thought](http://weblogs.asp.net/rosherove/archive/2006/05/16/446665.aspx), one of the more interesting answers that came up at teh TechEd Architecture panel by Guy Ron is that the Software Factories initiative is most likely to fail from the evidence thus far. He mentioned a big project for the healthcare industry ([HL7 Software Factory](http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=143694)) and how, even today, a long time after it started, it still has not finished. Microsoft was trying to build (with third parties) the full object model of the HL7 so that applications can be built against it.

For now, it has proved too complicated to come up with such generic components to be reused in “factory floor” applications, which may be a testament to upcoming difficulties that the software industry will face when trying to get on board with this methodology.

Guy mentioned that it may prove useful for only smaller scale projects and domain (like UI) and not for “real world” domains.

That’s an interesting thought that I had not considered and I can certainly see the logic behind it. Personally, I’m not sure about Factories. I think they are a step, some step, forward. We’ve only been doing this for a few decades. We have a lot to learn. Software is still a craftsmanship, and not a manufactured product. How do we move to that Cross Posted from [Blogs.Microsoft.Co.Il/Blogs/Royo](http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/Royo)


---

## About the author

**Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery.

### Sites

- [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership.
- [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts.
- [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin.
- [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model.
- [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps.
- [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes).

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### License

Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/