Brendan Wright

While manufacturing principles have brought higher-quality products to a wide variety of markets in shorter production times and at reduced costs, the software industry has struggled in applying the lessons of mass assembly to new application development. Manufacturing assembly in the software world requires standard building blocks to work from as the raw materials - in this case, reusable standard software components. That's no easy task, but achievable in the software world. What has held back true industrial production from those raw materials has traditionally been the more challenging processes and methodology required to transform those software components into an assembly that can produce competitive software. We should keep in mind how long it took for manufacturing to realize the processes, means of capital, and technological innovation that enabled what ... (more)