What is a Software Factory?
A software factory combines deterministic processes, agentic intelligence and human judgment to produce software and improve how it is produced.
- Deterministic processes coordinate tasks through versioned workflows, enforce access and approval policies, and check whether results meet the requirements to progress.
- Agentic intelligence researches, plans, implements and evaluates work using task-specific instructions, context and tools, collaborating with people and proposing improvements.
- Human judgment shapes product direction, makes key architectural and engineering decisions, resolves trade-offs and authorises changes to the software and the factory itself.
How much should a factory automate?
Section titled “How much should a factory automate?”Software factories let people choose which work agents carry out independently and where human judgement is required. You can require approval before implementation begins, review a completed change before delivery, or let work proceed automatically when its checks pass. These decision points are defined in advance and enforced by the factory.
You choose where to sit on this spectrum, from working with a coding assistant to a dark factory, where agents produce and review code with little routine human intervention. Different work can warrant different levels of autonomy; full autonomy is not a requirement of a software factory.
Improving how the factory works
Section titled “Improving how the factory works”Completed work provides evidence of what agents handle well, where checks catch problems and where people need to intervene. That evidence is used to improve the factory’s standards, policies, instructions and checks. Proposed changes are evaluated and benchmarked before adoption.
Improvements can target quality, delivery time, cost or the amount of human effort required. Greater agent autonomy may help achieve those goals, but the evidence needs to show that it does. Self-Improvement explains how evidence becomes tested changes to the factory.