initiatives. The following approaches cover Japanese, European, and North American initiatives. Industrialized software organization (Japan) Under this approach, software produced in the software factory is primarily used for control systems, nuclear reactors, turbines, etc. The main objectives of this approach are quality matched with productivity, ensuring that the increased costs do not weaken competitiveness. There is also the additional objective of creating an environment in which design, programming, testing, installation and maintenance can be performed in a unified manner. The key in improving quality and productivity is the reuse of software. Dominant traits of the organizational design include a determined effort to make operating work routine, simple and repetitive and to standardize work processes. A representative of this approach would be Toshiba's software factory concept, denoting the company's software division and procedures as they were in 1981 and 1987 respectively. Generic software factory (Europe) This approach was funded under the Eureka program and called the Eureka Software Factory. Participants in this project are large European companies, computer manufacturers, software houses, research institutes and universities. The aim of this approach is to provide the technology, standards, organizational support and other necessary infrastructures in order for software factories to be constructed and tailored from components marketed by independent suppliers. The objective of this approach is to produce an architecture and framework for integrated development environments. The generic software factory develops components and production environments that are part of software factories together with standards and guidance for software components. Experience-based component factory (North America) The experienced-based component factory is developed at the Software Engineering Laboratory at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. The goals of this approach are to "understand the software process in a production environment, determine the impact of available technologies and infuse identified/refined methods back into the development process". The approach has been to experiment with new technologies in a production environment, extract and apply experiences and data from experiments and to measure the impact with respect to cost, reliability and quality. This approach puts a heavy emphasis on continuous improvement through understanding the relationship between certain process characteristics and product qualities. The software factory is used to collect data about strengths and weaknesses to set baselines for improvements and to collect experiences to be reused in new projects. Mature software organization (North America) Defined by the Capability Maturity Model, this approach intended to create a framework to achieve a