3.7. Observations and Commentary

Industrialization of the software supply chain is seen as fundamental to cost control and efficiency in enterprise software delivery. Software factory situations such as those described here provide important insights for an industrialized view of enterprise software delivery, from which several observations can be made:

• A different set of ideas is needed for monitoring progress and effective status management in software factory approaches. Most traditional metrics highlight two kinds of measures: productivity in terms of function points or source lines of code delivered and quality in terms of defects per delivered module. Such measures are useful but insufficient for a supply chain view of enterprise software delivery. Instead, measures must focus on a broader set of service level agreements (SLAs) across providers, which may include measures of cost, predictability, variance to schedule, volatility in requirements, responsiveness to new requests, and so on. Similarly, the transparency of the supply chain delivery process becomes critical. This transp....