What a Software Factory Automates
A software factory is every step you can automate between a ticket and a merged pull request. What a small remote team automated first, and why the same factory will not fit a team that carries more risk.
Chapters
Transcript
Where the name comes from
Today's session is going to focus on design a software factory for your coding agent. What is software factory? Probably the name is a little bit little bit weird in that sense. we are used to factory, and factory is more like automation for different things. Now it becomes more and more software becomes like a factory. So this is one of the words which has been used by anthropic Dario Amodei. And then everyone started to pick their own software factory. If you go into GitHub topics, probably everywhere you see everyone is starting their own software factory. I will get into that shortly. What is it and what are all the things and components which is there in a software factory?
Ticket to pull request
Software factory is nothing but what are all the pieces you can automate from creating a ticket from product manager or from your technical team or from Dependabot from there till creating a pull request or even merging that pull request. So that automation, what are all the pieces you can automate is what software factories. Okay, let's go into what are all the things we have we have automated. basically for our need, some of the things we have automated is like Dependabot alerts. so oftentimes those ones we just need to verify how you know visual testing or the API testing, and automatically we can start to merge some of the minor version changes, maybe major version changes won't happen that way.
What one team automated
And then we have automated probably most of the companies have started to automate pull requests, at least the first set of pull request changes can be automated, and then we also automated clickup. clickup is the product management tool we use, and from the clickup, kick up is what product managers use, and from clickup we draw whenever there is an you know a status change, then we draw those tickets and we create those epic into smaller tasks using agents and then create a draft PR for you know first plan it out and if that plan is good enough then we will take and start working on the actual PR so that is one set of automations which has been done at Jobbatical which is really helpful now for a startup at our scale this works for a bigger company with multiple engineering team with a hierarchical structure then this factory alone won't work so that is where we will be talking about how to design your own startup factory the factory that works for myself for my company or for for my individual you know training needs might not work for your company because every company and their processes and their need in terms of or or their like risk might be much bigger for example I might be creating training material in this case the risk is going to be very small because even in in a production if you did breaks it is it is going to be a learning material for my for my boot camp takers but in a financial software you can't take that risk you merge it and you say hey it's just a landing you can't say that you need to have proper evaluation in picture, proper guard rails in there, and you need to have all the verification layer so that you know whatever goes into production is very stable enough. So that is where the risk and everything will be analyzed based on your need, and then you can define and create your software factory. What I am going to share in this session is like what are all the layers that is there in a typical software factory, and how you can design your own software factory using those layers. There are six layers into it.
This lesson is cut from the free Lightning session Design a Software Factory for Your Coding Agents. The Live Labs build the same system with you, free, on Thursdays: see the Live Labs.