I have been meaning to post a review of for some time.

 

This book in my mind represents the state of the art in software engineering today.  The book is based upon the concept of building families of similar, but distinct products, which have been around for years in other engineering disciplines such as civil, mechanical and electronics engineering.  These concepts promote the systematic reuse of like components and factored out variable components for customization in order to produce products that were similar but yet each one being unique.  This is commonly known as mass customization, something that is very new to the software world, but old hat for other industrialized engineering industries.

 

I know Software Factories is an overloaded term, but consider this definition: a factory is a highly organized production facility that produces members of a product line using standardized parts, tools and production processes.  The factory term is common in the industrialized engineering world, but extremely uncommon in our un-industrialized software development world.

 

Jack and Keith initially introduce us to dealing with complexity and change, which are the two fundamental problems in