A Virtual Factory Model for Complex Applications Development and Support

Over the last 10 years, the IBM Application Factory has woven together factory-floor assembly models and automation principles, sophisticated scheduling techniques, workflow management, and software quality methods in order to deliver high-quality software. It has progressively evolved to offer a unique approach to industrializing the development and support processes of complex applications through automation in three key areas of application lifecycle management.

Global governance, achieved by efficiently partitioning and managing the work of a fully productive, globally distributed workforce.
Lifecycle Acceleration, achieved by leveraging modeling techniques and patterns from requirements through test.
Labor Acceleration, achieved by capturing expert how-to knowledge at the process activity level for rapid, consistent execution by a globally distributed workforce.

Today, the Application Factory highly integrated platform is the virtual home of more than 25,000 application designers, developers and testers that are responsible for delivering around 100 application development and support services. Its highly disciplined delivery methods have generated an average of 20% to 35% reduction in the costs of implementing these services. Its underlying framework offers adequate capabilities for implementing virtual factory models that leverage a globally distributed workforce to also deliver infrastructure and business processes services.