Raja Gudepu, CEO and Founder, Oteemo, tells us: “When we think about what the software factory of the future ought to look like and how we assure quality throughout the software lifecycle, we could learn a thing or two from the world’s most innovative animation studio: Pixar.”
The concept of a ‘Software Factory’, in which software is assembled applying tried and true techniques from the world of manufacturing, is hardly a new idea. In fact, what many don’t fully appreciate is that it’s actually a well-established model that dates back more than 50 years when, in 1969, Hitachi adopted this moniker for its Hitachi Software Works program.
Over the course of the past decade, there has been a resurgence of interest in the software factory model and federal enterprises have placed an emphasis on it too. Earlier this summer, the US Army announced that it would set up a software factory to update its weapons systems and upskill its staff while the US Air Force referred to software factories as its new ‘Crown Jewels’. The ideals of the software factory embodies the values that business and technology leaders have long cherished: automation, hyper-efficiency and quality.
But software of course is not any ordinary physical widget; building quality software requires groups of diverse individuals to collaborate closely with one another to collectively solve problems under pressing deadlines. And as the nature of software development has evolved over the past decade, so too has the Software Factory.
Keep the line rolling no matter what
When we talk about the concept of the Software Factory, the immediate image that jumps to mind is Henry Ford whose Model T has become synonymous with the modern assembly line.
In this model, each individual on the line is a highly-trained specialist who performs the same series of tasks with exacting precision.
Because lost time equals lost money, this approach to manufacturing lives by the mantra: ‘Keep the assembly line rolling, no matter what’. If a particular product in the chain was defective, you pulled it off the line immediately. And the line kept rolling. In this tradition, quality control inspectors spot checked the line, but ultimately, hierarchy prevailed and only upper managers reserved the right to halt the line.
Few of us think about the assembly line as a process that engenders creativity. A productive assembly line is measured more by efficiency than it is by inspiration. However, as Japanese manufacturers began to rebuild after the Second World War, they pioneered a new way of making production a creative endeavor: they engaged workers and made quality control a priority over output – a somewhat radical and counterintuitive idea at the time.
The Toyota Production System, which emphasizes both excellence in technical performance via standardization of work and continuous improvement — as well as quality in people’s work lives — is perhaps a better reference model for the software factory. Whereas the conventional factory model demands that the production line never stops, the TPS assigns responsibility for finding and fixing problems to every employee. If anyone, at any level, spotted a problem, they were expected to stop the assembly line.
At face value, the TPS model sounds great. Every team member has the opportunity to halt the production line when they spot an issue. But anyone who has run a software team knows that delivering quality software on a regular cadence requires more than agility and automation. There are deadlines to be met. And, tools and processes without the right culture often stops work for the wrong reasons (i.e. arguing with the product team about features they think should be included and not directly related to quality, etc).
What Pixar can teach the Software Factory about quality
When we think about what the software factory of the future ought to look like and how we assure quality throughout the software lifecycle, we could learn a thing or two from the world’s most innovative animation studio: Pixar.
Each Pixar film could itself be thought of as a very long and highly complex software project. And since Pixar only produces one or two films every couple of years, the investment and risk is enormous. Despite the protracted timelines of these films, the pressure of deadlines is a constant reality. Yet despite these pressures, quality doesn’t come at the expense of velocity.
Though Pixar doesn’t create its films on a traditional assembly line, the creation of an animated film follows a similar arc, with each team passing their work product off to the next, who then pushes it further down the line. Borrowing from the TPS model, Pixar recognized early on that in order for its final product to be of the highest quality, any member of the team must feel empowered to pull the cord to stop the line if a problem is identified.
Of course, Pixar releasing a new film every couple of years is a very different animal than a software team deploying new releases on a near continuous basis. However, there are lessons from each of these examples that can help build the right culture to support a modern software factory.
Consider some of the following insights from Pixar and how they might inform your own software development practice:
● Embed quality into every phase of the software lifecycle. Be careful not to confuse the process with the goal. As Pixar’s executive team came to appreciate: ‘making the process better, easier and cheaper is an important aspiration and something to continually work on – but it isn’t the goal. Making something great is the goal.’ Quality oriented metrics and benchmarks should be established at the outset of every release and evaluated in post-mortems as workflows and processes are refined.
● Be intentional about the culture you create. Pixar believes that every member of their team should feel empowered to ‘pull the cord’ in the name of quality. However, building a culture where every team member feels fully invested in the final product requires a culture in which feedback is actively solicited from all stakeholders and is operationalized in a manner that encourages constructive collaboration rather than leaping in and shouting ‘stop the line’.
● Make the extra effort to build cross functional teams. Traditional assembly lines were a model of efficiency because of the hyper-specialization of workers. Modern software teams, however, will benefit from exposing individuals from different disciplines and mental models to one another. Pixar recognized there was great value in having its artists learn about software development and vice versa – it helped them build better software tools for the artists and helped forge trust between the various teams.
● Embrace the fact that plans aren’t fool proof. Complex software projects require a great deal of planning. But as the Pixar team discovered, ‘over-planners just take longer to be wrong’. Unlike software, movies don’t have strict user or security requirements that need to be met at the end of the day. Yet they are similar in that there will always be retakes and that the road to completion will require a great deal of experimentation and failure.
It’s hard to say what the future Software Factory will look like. Undoubtedly automation and standardization, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning operations (MLOps) will be foundational as software becomes more complex and entangled. Wherever you might happen to be in your Software Factory journey, you would do well to remember the first line of the Agile Manifesto, which urges us to value ‘individuals and interactions over processes and tools’.
Creating and protecting the right culture, one that inspires everyone to care about quality, will help ensure your organization has a solid chassis in place that can support and extend your most ambitious software-driven initiatives.
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