Though Japan has successfully competed with U.S. companies in the manufacturing and marketing of computer hardware, it has been less successful in developing computer programs. This book contains the first detailed analysis of how Japanese firms have tried to redress this imbalance by applying their skills in engineering and production management to software development. Cusumano focuses on the creation of "software factories" in which large numbers of people are engaged in developing software in cooperative ways--i.e. individual programs are not developed in isolation but rather utilize portions of other programs already developed whenever possible, and then yield usable portions for other programs being written. Devoting chapters to working methods at System Developing Corp., Hitachi, Toshiba, NEC, and Fujitsu, and including a comparison of Japanese and U.S. software factories, Cusumano's book will be important reading for all people involved in software and computer technology, as well as those interested in Japanese business and corporate culture.

The subject of this book is the control of software engineering. The rapidly increasing demand for software is accompanied by a growth in the number of products on the market, as well as their size and complexity. Our ability to control software engineering is hardly keeping pace with this growth. As a result, software projects are often late, software products sometimes lack the required quality and the productivity improvements achieved by software engineering are insufficient to keep up with the demand This book describes ways to improve software engineering control. It argues that this should be expanded to include control of the development, maintenance and reuse of software, thus making it possible to apply many of the ideas and concepts that originate in production control and quality control. The book is based on research and experience accumulated over a number of years. During this period I had two employers: Eindhoven University of Technology and Philips Electronics. Research is not a one-man activity and I would like to thank the following persons for their contributions to the successful completion of this project. First and foremost my Ph. D. advisers Theo Bemelmans, Hans van Vliet and Fred Heemstra whose insights and experience proved invaluable at every stage. Many thanks are also due to Rob Kusters and Fred Heemstra for their patience in listening to my sometimes wild ideas and for being such excellent colleagues.

Though Japan has successfully competed with U.S. companies in the manufacturing and marketing of computer hardware, it has been less successful in developing computer programs. This book contains the first detailed analysis of how Japanese firms have tried to redress this imbalance by applying their skills in engineering and production management to software development. Cusumano focuses on the creation of "software factories" in which large numbers of people are engaged in developing software in cooperative ways--i.e. individual programs are not developed in isolation but rather utilize portions of other programs already developed whenever possible, and then yield usable portions for other programs being written. Devoting chapters to working methods at System Developing Corp., Hitachi, Toshiba, NEC, and Fujitsu, and including a comparison of Japanese and U.S. software factories, Cusumano's book will be important reading for all people involved in software and computer technology, as well as those interested in Japanese business and corporate culture.

The Eureka Software Factory project (ESF) was set up by a Group of European partners in 1987. Its objective was broadly to improve the large-scale software production process by introducing an industrialised approach to have The Software Factory Challenge social, organisational and technical aspects. The project was set up under the pan-European Eureka programme, and it was funded by the partners together with their national governments. This book is not a history of the ESF project, but rather a presentation of its main ideas and achievements, and an account of how the concepts pioneered by the project have become part of a general movement in both the industrial and academic domains. In this movement, the facility for the production, use and maintenance of large-scale computer artefacts (the Software Factory) is treated in a wide and `organic' way, so as to include concepts such as business value and process improvement; with the development of new technologies being driven by these new, wide requirements. This new approach is in contrast with a narrowly technological one, in which individual tasks like programming are aided by machines but in which the production process as a whole is not supported. The main body of the book is divided into four Parts. Part I gives a short overview of the ESF project and its ideas, and goes on to attempt to place the ESF work in the context of industry as a whole (with reference to both producers and users of Information Technology systems). Part II sets out to explain the technological basis of the Software Factory as seen by ESF and goes on to describe some experimental and pioneering implementations of Factory Support Environments and their constituents. Part III is devoted to the most complete implementation of an ESF Factory Support Environment to date, Kernel/2r. This Section provides a highly detailed discussion of both design and implementation issues. In Part IV addresses what deployment strategies are now available to continue the spread of these ideas in order to meet the goal of better software-based systems (i.e. systems which are safer, more economical to build, more easily changed and more useful than those that have been built up to now). Finally, a Glossary of Terms and a list of References is given. Readers: those who have a professional interest in Information Technology.