According to the Standish Group, businesses in the United States spend around $250 billion on software development each year on approximately 175,000 projects, and only 16% of these projects finish on schedule and within budget. Another 31% are cancelled, mainly due to quality problems, for losses of about $81 billion. Another 53% exceed their budgets by an average of 189%, for losses of about $59 billion.

Projects reaching completion deliver an average of only 42% of the originally planned features.

These numbers confirm objectively what we all know by experience, which is that software development is very expensive, derived from the fact that it is labor intensive.

Only modest productivity gains have been accomplished over the last 10-15 years, the most important perhaps being patterns and agile methods. Apart from these advances, we still develop software the way we did ten years ago: hand-coded and file-oriented. Our methods and practices have not really changed much, and neither have its associated costs and risks.

Economies of scope can be realized in the context of a product family, whose members vary, while sharing many common features. A product family may contain either end products, such as portfolio management , ERP or CRM applications, or components, such as account management frameworks used by portfolio management and ERP/CRM applications.

A product family provides a context in which many problems common to family members can be solved in one place. Building on software product line concepts, software factories can provide family wide solutions, while managing variation among the family members.

A software factory systematically captures knowledge of how to produce the members of a specific product family, makes it available in the form of assets, like patterns, frameworks, models and tools, and then systematically applies those assets to automate the development of further family members, reducing cost and time to market, and improving product quality.

With software factories, you can develop in one place, and reuse that feature in multiple applications, without the associated increased maintenance costs. You only have to maintain the original code at the factory repository!

At Isomeris we are developing AtomWeaver, a software factory that allows you to capture knowledge and code and reuse them in multiple projects, without the burden of maintaining a large base of one-shot, uncategorized code.