application design choices and the motivation for those choices. How-to topics: Provide procedures and instructions for completing tasks. Recipes: Automate procedures in How-to topics, either entirely or in specific steps. They can help developers complete routine tasks with minimal input. Templates: Pre-made application elements with placeholders for arguments. They can be used for creating initial project items. Designers: Provide information that developers can use to model applications at a higher level of abstraction. Reusable code: Components that implement common functionality or mechanisms. Integration of reusable code in a software factory reduces the requirements for manually written code and encourages reuse across applications. Product development Building a product using a software factory involves the following activities: Problem analysis: Determines whether the product is in the scope of a software factory. The fit determines whether all or some of the product is built with the software factory. Product specification: Defines the product requirements by outlining the differences from the product line requirements using a range of product specification mechanisms. Product design: Maps the differences in requirements to differences in product line architecture and development process to produce a customized process. Product implementation: A range of mechanisms can be used to develop the implementation depending on the extent of the differences. Product deployment: Involves creating or reusing default deployment constraints and configuring the required resources necessary to install the executables being deployed. Product testing: Involves creating or reusing test assets (such as test cases, data sets, and scripts) and applying instrumentation and measurement tools. Benefits Developing applications using a software factory can provide many benefits when compared to conventional software development approaches. These include the following: Consistency: Software factories can be used to build multiple instances of a software product line (a set of applications sharing similar features and architecture), making it easier to achieve consistency. This simplifies governance and also lowers training and maintenance costs. Quality: Using a software factory makes it easier for developers to learn and implement proven practices. Because of the integration of reusable code, developers are able to spend more time working on features that are unique to each application, reducing the likelihood of design flaws and code defects. Applications developed using a software factory can also be verified before deployment, ensuring that factory-specific best practices were followed during development. Productivity: Many application development activities can be streamlined and automated, such as reusing software assets and generating code