Tomorrow's Software Factory--Today

By Matthew Heusser

January 31, 2006

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If you read enough technology news, you are bound to run into the software factory. One periodical I will not name (okay, it ends with "world") seems to run an annual story on the potential for software factories.

What is a software factory? Why, it's a set of components that enable developers to assemble programs, instead of writing them by hand.

I suggest that the majority of software departments around the world are already software factories and the gurus pushing the software factory ideal have completely missed the bus.

The Software Blacksmith Shop

Before examining real software factories, I will have to define the small smidgen of people who are not. One such enclave still exists; a small segment of the computer science department of Hood College.

In 1993 I took a class in assembler at Hood. For one of the assignments, we had to take a half-dozen instructions in machine code.

A sample problem might be to convert the following assembler statement into hexidecimal notation:

     MOVL Ax, 10;

Turning MOVL into hex means looking up the assembly command, marshalling the operands, adding buffer for the third operand (this command doesn't have a third operand, but ADDL VAR1, VAR2, VARr3 would, and all operations took the same space, so I had to pad it), then doing an endian conversion and possibly fiddling with parity bits.

Hex is ugly. Really bad. Seriously, you never want to write code--or anything else--in hex.

Of course, you probably don't have to. Today that kind of work is only done by theoretical computer scientists, hardware engineers, and struggling college students.

The next step up from hex is an assembler--coding the MOVL Ax, 10 commands.

In class, we wrote a lot of assembler--so much that we learned how to write functions and procedures in assembler, or mimic them using the stack. Eventually I could paste all my functions into a new program and then, for the most part, write a main routine that called those lower-level functions.

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