Enabling enterprise integration through architecture

Abstract

For firms to effectively compete in today's turbulent market environment, their supporting software systems must be able to provide new, effective system solutions in a timeframe necessary to enable the business change required to remain competitive. In order to provide flexible responsive information systems, may organizations are pursing the idea of building software using factory-like concepts. To develop a software factory, information systems professionals focus on building standardized production processes, components, and tools that could be reused across new system solutions. To date, these attempts have resulted in the ability to build domain specific applications, but these applications are limited in there capability to be extensible. Thus, the requirement for systems to rapidly adapt has not been met. One of the major reasons for these limited results has been the failure to design the software factory concept upon an appropriate paradigm. Using the mass customization paradigm, this research effort represents a conceptual step towards building new system solutions based upon these driving business needs by identifying the functional requirements for its use as a referent architecmral paradigm for an adaptive software factory.

Using grounded theory, this exploratory research effort attempts to identify the functional requirements of the command, control, and communication mechanism of a mass customization based software factory by evaluating current research and development projects centered around the ideas of the software factory and component reuse. By grounding this research effort in the context in which the solution must apply, the formal propositions developed thorough this research effort will have a high degree of external consistency.