Software factories: a conversation with Ward Cunningham and Jack Greenfield

On Friday I had a talk with two of Microsoft's patterns & practices leaders: Ward Cunningham and Jack Greenfield. Ward (along with Kent Beck) ignited the patterns movement with a seminal paper at OOPSLA 1987. Jack developed NeXT's Enterprise Objects Framework (now Apple's WebObjects), was a chief architect at Rational, and is now a Microsoft architect for enterprise frameworks and tools.

The focus of the discussion was Jack Greenfield's notion of software factories -- a way to accelerate the process of codifying software patterns and creating the tools and frameworks that enable people to apply those patterns. In our conversation you'll hear a lot of terminology that may be unfamiliar to you. Some of it was unfamiliar to me too, so I put together this glossary:

• PAG: Prescriptive Architecture Guide
• PAG: Prescriptive Architecture Group, the Microsoft team that codifies patterns and practices, and produces prescriptive guidance
• Avenade: A Microsoft/Accenture joint venture
• patterns & practices: A set of prescriptive guides from Microsoft
• ACA.NET: The Avenade Conneted Architecture for .NET
• Enterprise Library: "the next generation of the patterns & practices Application Blocks," a Microsoft/Avenade collaboration
• Application Blocks: freely-available .NET class libraries that implement various best practices
• Gang of Four: Authors of Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
• Integration Patterns: A patterns & practices book of software patterns
• Pipes and filters: A example of an integration pattern
• Software Factories: Assembling Applications with Patterns, Models, Frameworks, and Tools: Jack Greenfield's paper describing his notion of software factories. (An excerpt from a Wiley book of the same name.)
• Software Product Lines: According to the Software Engineering Institute, "A Software Product Line is a set of software-intensive systems that share a common, managed set of features satisfying the specific needs of a particular market segment or mission and that are developed from a common set of core assets in a prescribed way."
• Domain Specific Language Tools: "This download contains a graphical designer hosted in Visual Studio 2005 for designing and editing the concepts (or metamodel) of visual domain specific languages."
• UML: Unified Modeling Language

Here is the conversation: download (MP3, 54 minutes, 19.5 MB).

Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2004/11/22.html#a1119