Experimental investigation of the quality and productivity of software factories based development

Software organizations are always looking for approaches that help improve the quality and productivity of developed software products. Quality software is easy to maintain and reduces the cost of software development. The Software Factories (SF) approach is one of the approaches to provide such benefits. In this paper, the quality and productivity benefits of the SF approach were examined and evaluated with an experiment involving two treatments the traditional and the SF approach. For the purposes of this experiment, the Goal – Question – Metric (GQM) approach was used. Participants were grouped into thirty-two teams. There were sixteen projects available. The results were evaluated and presented through quality and productivity criteria, which were used for the experimental study. The results showed that the Software Factories approach was significantly better than the traditional approach.