Software Factory
What a Software Factory is, and the automations that run one: planning the backlog, building features, fixing bugs, shepherding pull requests, handling incidents and reporting on the work.
- 13 articles, newest first
- A label on an issue is the whole protocol between agents The development-workflow skill in the software-factory.dev factory is the factory's own map of itself. It shows that the automations never call each other: they coordinate through labels on issues.
- An automated status report is only as honest as its prompt The weekly recap automation in the software-factory.dev factory stays honest because the honesty is written into its prompt: the challenges section is what makes it authentic, and an unrecorded number has to be named as unrecorded.
- An automation that audits the factory must not rewrite its own record The automation auditor in the software-factory.dev factory inspects every other automation on the line. Its most useful rule: it may never overwrite last week's audit.
- Escalated work needs a return path back onto the line The smallest automation in the software-factory.dev factory puts escalated issues back on the line once a human has answered. The return path from human to machine needs its own owner.
- Set the stale-work clock from your agents' cycle time The Stale-Issue Reviewer at software-factory.dev calls work stale after three hours, not three days, because a watcher's clock has to run at the speed of the line it watches.
- The PR Shepherd resolves only the conflicts it understands The PR Shepherd in the software-factory.dev factory rebases conflicted pull requests but hands semantic conflicts to a human. The hard part of automation is encoding where its competence ends.
- What is a Software Factory? A Software Factory coordinates agents, context, deterministic gates, and human decisions across the path from intent to production.
- A bug-fix automation must never exit quietly The bug-fix automation in the software-factory.dev factory has two ways to end a run: it ships a fix or escalates to a human. Honest failure is a feature you have to design.
- The Feature Builder checks for open bugs before it builds The software-factory.dev build automation runs a pre-flight check first: a priority-1 or priority-2 bug nobody has picked up stops all new feature work.
- An improvement automation needs a cap on its ambition The Product Improver in the software-factory.dev factory files at most three issues a run, and zero when it finds nothing worthwhile.
- Fix the incident and the rule in the same commit The Incident Responder in the software-factory.dev factory updates the conventions document in the same commit as the fix, so the rule that would have prevented the bug is there before the next change.
- Cross user feedback against usage before it becomes work The Feedback Digest in the software-factory.dev factory reads new feedback next to seven days of usage data, and files an issue only when the evidence backs it.
- The Feature Planner writes its own backlog, behind a human gate The triage automation in the software-factory.dev factory also writes its own backlog when the line runs dry, and routes anything risky through a person first.