Designing and implementing the software factory — a case study from telecommunications

The paper reports the actions taken by a large Swedish information technology business to repair defects in the production of system software. Typical problems were late delivery, poor maintainability, lack of documentation. The approach taken to remove the defects consisted in introducing into software production the time‐ and specification‐oriented culture of the factory. Software writing had usually been delegated to more or less autonomous individuals inside R&D, with the result that expertize was often unrecorded, residing in those individuals' brains, procedures were poorly documented, cross‐fertilization with other projects was minimal and lead times were long. The authors identify three reasons for this situation: management ignorance of how the design process operates; professional exclusiveness of design staff; reluctance of managers to exercise supervision over a design engineer's daily tasks. The solution was to differentiate and rationally define jobs within the design function, set up a flat managerial structure overseeing a group of integrated teams each consisting of a senior system designer plus a junior designer leading four semi‐skilled technicians, introduce a well‐defined work‐flow organization, make use of quality circles, install review procedures, undertake leadership and interpersonal skill training, and take measures to ensure effective communication in all directions. The new approach has partly been successfully operated for several years. The paper concludes with a discussion of some of the positive and negative lessons which have been learnt during the implementation.