Quality Control as part of a Software Factory

Hernan de Lahitte writes about the FxCop rules included in the WebService Factory that analyze the security of WCF code and configuration files.

That's a really cool feature I think - not only using FxCop to examine code, but to examine configuration too (we all know that we have moved from DLL-Hell to Config-Hell, right?).

What struck me also as an important idea, was using code analysis as a part of a software factory. The point of a software factory is to make the creation and modification of software a much more automated, commoditized exercise - moving from the craft mentality to the assembly-line mentality. Using the Guidance Automation Toolkit, code snippets, templates, frameworks, DSL's, code generation, and so on, all are part of a software factory.

 Now, thinking about these code analysis rules, I think that unit tests and code analysis should form part of a software factory too - let's have the factory create the interfaces and the tests that exercise the interfaces, and let's have the compiler run code analysis over the whole thing to ensure that the way we are using the components, adding custom code, and so on, conforms to the patterns that the factory designer originally intended. Like any good modern factory, quality control is a critical aspect of the efficiency of production - automating processes should always increase quality (just like using a computer should always be easier than not using a computer).