Alan W Brown argues that to scale software delivery in large organizations effectively, we must adopt a factory-like model—standardizing processes, tools, and governance to create a repeatable, efficient software supply chain。
1. 🏭 Enterprise Software “Factories”: The Vision
Brown draws an analogy to manufacturing: just as factories produce large quantities of consistent physical goods, a software factory produces enterprise applications through defined, reusable assets and standardized processes. This is key to handling global delivery, complex stakeholder demands, and rapid change.
2. The Five Factory Principles
🎯 1. Aligning Business and Engineering
- Business requirements and strategic goals must be tightly coupled with engineering execution.
- Factory infrastructure must translate stakeholder needs into delivery processes explicitly.
🤖 2. Automating Processes and Tasks
- Automate as many steps as possible: builds, deployments, testing, monitoring.
- This reduces manual errors, speeds delivery, and improves consistency across projects.
💾 3. Leveraging Enterprise-wide Assets
- Share components, patterns, templates, and best practices across teams.
- Avoid duplication by building on proven artifacts across solutions and projects.
📦 4. Supporting Lean Processes & Integrated Infrastructures
- Encourage lean delivery cycles, continuous integration (CI), and continuous delivery (CD).
- Leverage integrated infrastructures—such as shared DevOps, virtual environments, and collaborative ALM—to sustain agility at scale.
📊 5. Automating Operational Measurement & Control
- Standardize metrics collection—team velocity, defect rates, deployment frequency.
- Use dashboards to provide real-time visibility to stakeholders at every level.
🧩 Key Elements of a Software Factory
Brown breaks down essential components of a factory model into five pillars:
- Business Management: Clear governance, demand intake, strategic alignment, and portfolio decision-making.
- Asset Production & Maintenance: Centralized, versioned repository of reusable code modules, patterns, and infrastructure artefacts.
- Application Development & Delivery Management: Standardized practices for development workflow, automated pipelines, code quality gates.
- Application Infrastructure & Deployment: Available, consistent environments for CI/CD, staging, testing, and production deployment.
- Governance: Policies, quality controls, and compliance mechanisms embedded into tooling and operational workflows.
⏩ Why Software Factories Matter Today
- Coordinate globally: Shared tooling, architectures, and assets reduce regional discrepancies.
- Accelerate delivery: Automation speeds execution for both greenfield and brownfield scenarios.
- Elevate quality: Reuse and consistent pipelines reduce defects and technical debt.
- Increase transparency: Dashboards and metrics enable data-driven decision-making across teams.
- Support evolution: Factories adapt more easily to agile and DevOps practices as they scale.
That said, how can we actually achieve it?
Think about Atomic Habits by James Clear in an organizational level.
The four stages
Stage1: Noticing
Note: Clarity Over Motivation, Team may not lack motivation—but lack a clear plan
- Evaluate all the good habits and bad habits of the team, processes, architechtures etc, just notice all of them
- Use a Failure Premortem to predict obstacles and try to aovid them as much as we can
Stage 2 – Wanting
Title: Design Your Environment
- Environment shapes desire – Leaderst sets up the environment, so be careful, leaders.
- Be the architect, not the victim, try the best to set the environment to be more friendly and efficient
Stage 3 – Doing
Title: Reps > Results
- Here, quantity beats quality, make sure the change is small enough so that team can follow easily. Make it easy to begin.
- Optimize for the start, not the finish. For example, if you want to do a team retro, the most important step is to get team into the room first.
Stage 4 – Liking
Title: Reward the Habit, Not the Result
- Good habits have delayed rewards
- Create instant feedback to stay on track
- “Don’t break the chain” strategy with a wall calendar. If someone from your team did not finish it on time, or with good quality, do not lose patience, praise the good part and cheer him for better next time.
Identity: The True Goal
- Habits shape identity
- Change Your Habits, Change Your Life, Change Your Team. Not just behavior change, . Not just results. Identity change
- Once your team thinks they are in a different identiy, like we are high-performing team, they are proud of this new identity, it will be so much easier for you as a leader to manage a team.
Good luch with Atomi hait applied in your organization for software delivery!
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