What Is a Software Factory?

Zach Lloyd defines a software factory as an agentic system in the cloud where a team defines the roles of various agents across building software for the team or for the product. The agents have a certain amount of autonomy and can do things on their own. The system should be very measurable and very closed loop. Over time the team can tune, measure, and benchmark it, and get confidence that people switching to agentic development are doing it in the most scalable and efficient way.

When he talks to companies or developers, most of the world is trying to build some sort of internal software factory or a set of software factories. People trying to build their own often start by stringing together different automations. Sometimes they conceive of a software factory as not a specific thing. They are using agents a lot to ship software and calling it their internal software factory.