The concept of a software factory denotes a software development environment that supports a more industrialised production of software with engineering-like and manufacturing-like practices. The concept dates back to the 1950s and late 1960s when it was first proposed in the United States and Europe. In the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s, Japanese major computer manufacturers further the concept, making significant improvement in software development. In this seminar, we give a global landscape view and development status of the software factory approaches from leading software regions of United States, Europe and Japan. The essentials of these approaches were extracted and used to form the theoretical framework for building a Software Factory for diffusing software-based technologies. Building steps for such a Software Factory will be demonstrated, and efficient diffusion is achieved through adopting the traditional diffusion of innovation model. Organisations planning to adopt a Software Factory model for diffusing software-based technologies could use our derived model as benchmarking, or directly adopting it with fine tuning conducted to adapt the model to the specific organisational design and specific business needs of the adopting organisations. Such software diffusion process could be nurtured upwards from an enterprise level to an industrial level, and towards a National level attaining a platform for both technological and economic growth for a country.

About the Speakers

Mr. NK Lim is an industrial practitioner involving in functional areas of product development, product management, and market development. His industry experiences span across the Personal Computer and the telecommunication industry. His academic research works on areas of software engineering and telecommunication were published in several international conference proceedings and journals. He has a Master of Engineering (research) from Nanyang Technological University of Singapore, and is currently a PhD research candidate with the Department of Decision Sciences, Faculty of Business Administration, NUS.