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Excerpt from System Development Corporation: Defining the Factory Challenge Two reports on the SDC Software Factory published in 1975 and 1977 were a part of this literature, and presented convincing arguments promoting engineering or factory-type discipline, planning, and control as a model for managing large-scale software development. SDC allowed its factory effort to lapse in 1978, although the experiment has had considerable influence on industry practices in the U.S. and abroad. The factory procedures became a model for SDC's corporate practices and for the software standards later adopted by the U.S. Department of Defense. But perhaps the largest impact of the SDC experiment has been in Japan - particularly at Hitachi, Toshiba, and Nec - where managers have emphasized the factory approach even more than the U.S. pioneer. This case is organized into four parts. The first discusses the Software Factory initiative in the context of SDC's evolution as a company from the mid- 1950s through the early 1970s. The second section analyzes the main components of the Factory at its inception in 1976 --a set of standardized procedures, tools to support the development process, and a matrix organization dividing labor between system design, done at customer sites, and actual software production-- detailed design, coding, and testing - done in the factory. This is followed by an account of the factory's opening and dissolution after less than three years of operation. The next section compares accounts of the performance of the factory with the five major problems SDC staff designed the factory to solve, and identifies three more serious problems the factory experiment created: imbalances in the work flow, breakdown of the matrix system, and resistance on the part of middle-level mangers to the organizational changes the new system required. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com Thi
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System Development Corporation: Defining the Factory Challenge
Book reviews » System Development Corporation: Defining the Factory Challenge (Classic Reprint)
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