Software factories
What is a software factory? Meaning, history and the military model
A software factory is a team and a shared setup that ships software the same way every time, through standard tools, automated pipelines and one platform. Hitachi was the first company to call a software group a factory, in 1969. Today the term mostly means a DevSecOps setup like the Air Force's Kessel Run, or a system of coding agents.
Ankit KumarPublished
On this page
- What is a software factory?
- Where does the term "software factory" come from?
- What is a software factory in the military?
- What is a continuous ATO?
- What is an AI software factory?
- How is a software factory different from DevOps?
- What is a software factory made of?
- Where Buildful fits
- Frequently asked questions
What is a software factory?
A software factory turns writing software from a one-off project into a repeatable process. Instead of every team picking its own tools and inventing its own release steps, everyone builds on the same pipeline and the same platform, so new work moves from code to production by a known path.
The US Department of Defense, which runs dozens of them, gives a plain definition. Its DevSecOps Fundamentals define a software factory as "a collection of people, tools, and processes that enables teams to continuously deliver value by deploying software to meet the needs of a specific community of end users." The same document says it uses automation to replace manual processes.
The word "factory" points at repetition. A software factory doesn't ship one program: it ships many programs, and many versions of each, through the same line.
Where does the term "software factory" come from?
Ivan Aaen, Peter Bøtcher and Lars Mathiassen's chapter Software Factories traces it like this:
| Year | Who | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| 1968 | R. W. Bemer, General Electric | Suggested GE build a software factory with standard tools and a database of past work for management control |
| Late 1960s | M. D. McIlroy, AT&T | Proposed a factory-like approach built on reusing code |
| 1969 | Hitachi | The first company to call a software organization a factory |
| 1975 to 1976 | System Development Corporation | Set up the second software factory, the first in the US |
| 1976 to 1977 | NEC, Toshiba and Fujitsu | Launched their own factory efforts in Japan |
MIT professor Michael Cusumano studied the Japanese factories in Japan's Software Factories (Oxford University Press, 1991), which describes how those firms organized large numbers of people to develop software together.
In 2004 the term came back with a different meaning. Jack Greenfield and Keith Short, architects at Microsoft, published Software Factories (Wiley), a method for building reusable patterns, languages, frameworks and tools for one kind of problem and then assembling applications from them.
What is a software factory in the military?
In the US military, a software factory is a unit that builds and ships its own software through an approved DevSecOps pipeline, often with its own service members writing the code. The DoD CIO's State of DevSecOps report (March 2025) counts more than 50 of them. Three of the best known:
| Factory | Service | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Kessel Run | Air Force | Builds command and control and targeting software |
| Platform One | Air Force | Runs the shared DevSecOps platform other factories build on |
| Army Software Factory | Army | Trains soldiers and civilians as developers who build Army apps |
Kessel Run began as the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center's Detachment 12. Its 2020 award nomination says the name comes from the Star Wars smuggling route, because the team set out to "smuggle" agile development into the DoD, starting with a tanker planning tool called Jigsaw. The same nomination says Kessel Run received the department's first continuous authority to operate for its CI/CD pipeline. In 2021 it signed the first user agreement between a major Air Force command and a software factory. Today it's a division of C3BM, the Air Force office that manages its battle network.
Platform One is the factory that serves other factories. A 2021 Air Force release says it helps them focus on mission apps by providing collaboration and cybersecurity tools, source code repositories, artifact repositories and development tools. Its best-known piece is Iron Bank, which the F-35 program office describes as a hardened container image repository at the center of the DoD's software supply chain.
The Army Software Factory opened in January 2021 on a community college campus in Austin, Texas. Soldiers and Army civilians learn agile development there in class, then apply it on real projects for Army clients. It's now an Army Transformation and Training Command unit, with people working as product managers, product designers, software engineers and platform engineers.
What is a continuous ATO?
A continuous ATO lets a factory ship new versions without a fresh security approval each time. An authority to operate (ATO) is the approval a DoD system needs before it can run on military networks, and the usual kind is a point-in-time review.
The DoD CIO's 2022 cATO memo asks for three things in its place: continuous monitoring of security controls, active cyber defense against threats in real time, and use of an approved DevSecOps reference design. An Air Force briefing on Platform One puts the approach in three parts: authorize the platform, authorize the DevSecOps process, and authorize the team. Once those are approved, each release rides on them. Kessel Run's nomination says its continuous ATO let it push applications to classified networks in under an hour.
That's much of the point of a military software factory. The pipeline is approved once, and what passes through it ships on that approval.
What is an AI software factory?
In 2026 the term picked up a third meaning: a system where coding agents take a ticket or a bug report all the way to a tested pull request, and a person steps in only to review and merge. It's the same idea as the earlier factories, with the coding itself automated as well as the path to production. Factory, the company behind the Droid coding agent, sells its product under the name, and What is Factory AI? covers what it includes. The Hashnode blog covers the AI software factory in depth: what one is made of, who ships one and what the hype skips.
How is a software factory different from DevOps?
DevOps is a way of working, and a software factory is a place where that way of working runs. The DoD's DevSecOps Fundamentals describe DevSecOps as a set of practices and tools that unifies development, security and operations. A software factory is the team, pipelines and platform that put those practices to work for a particular group of users.
| DevOps (or DevSecOps) | Software factory | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A set of practices and a culture | An organization with its own tools, pipelines and platform |
| What you can point to | Habits: small releases, automated tests, shared ownership | Things: a CI/CD pipeline, a container registry, a team with a name |
| Scope | Any team, any size | Usually a whole department or a group of teams |
| Example | A small team whose every merge deploys automatically | Kessel Run, Platform One |
So you can practice DevOps without anything you'd call a factory.
What is a software factory made of?
Most software factories, military or not, have the same parts. The DoD's DevSecOps Fundamentals group their capabilities under infrastructure, a digital platform and applications, and note that one factory may run several "assembly lines", which in software are CI/CD pipelines.
| Part | What it does | Example from the DoD |
|---|---|---|
| Pipelines | Build, test, scan and deploy every change the same way | Kessel Run's CI/CD pipeline, with its continuous ATO |
| Platform | Shared infrastructure every team deploys onto | Platform One |
| Standard tooling | Source repositories, artifact repositories, approved images | Iron Bank's hardened containers |
| People and process | Teams trained on the same methods, with set roles | The Army Software Factory's four job tracks |
| Security approval | Lets releases ship without a new review each time | A continuous ATO |
The pipeline is the part most people picture, but the platform and the approved tools are what let a new team start shipping without building its own setup from scratch.
Where Buildful fits
Buildful is a background coding agent. You describe a task, such as a bug fix or a new feature, and it builds it in a private cloud sandbox, runs your repo's checks, tests UI changes in a real browser with a recording, and opens a pull request on your GitHub repo for you to review.
That covers the coding and the checks before review: the step from a written task to a tested pull request. It doesn't build or run your CI/CD pipeline, host a platform, deploy to production or handle approvals like an ATO. Your own pipeline picks up from the pull request once you merge.
Buildful Pro is $10 a month for 1,000 tasks, or ₹750 in India, and Team is $40 a month for 3,000 tasks shared by unlimited members (₹3,500 in India). Smart Mode picks the right open-weight model for each task, and you can pick a frontier model like Claude yourself.
Frequently asked questions
What is a software factory in the DoD?
In the Department of Defense, a software factory is a collection of people, tools and processes that delivers software continuously to a specific group of users, using an approved DevSecOps pipeline. The DoD CIO counted more than 50 of them in March 2025. Kessel Run, Platform One and the Army Software Factory are the best known.
Is a software factory the same as a CI/CD pipeline?
No. A CI/CD pipeline is one part of a software factory. The DoD describes pipelines as the factory's assembly lines, and a factory can run several of them on a shared platform, with the people, tools and security approvals around them.
What is a factory in coding?
In code, a "factory" usually means the factory design pattern: a function or class whose job is to create objects, so the calling code doesn't need to know which exact class it gets. It has nothing to do with a software factory, which is an organization and its delivery setup.
Who first used the term software factory?
R. W. Bemer suggested in 1968 that General Electric build a software factory, and Hitachi became the first company to call a software organization a factory in 1969. System Development Corporation set up the first US software factory in 1975 and 1976.
What is Kessel Run?
Kessel Run is a US Air Force software unit that began as Detachment 12 of the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center and is now a division of the Air Force's C3BM office. It builds command and control and targeting software, and its 2020 award nomination says it got the department's first continuous authority to operate, for its CI/CD pipeline.
What is the Army Software Factory?
The Army Software Factory is an Army unit in Austin, Texas, that trains soldiers and Army civilians to build software, then puts them on teams that build apps for Army units. It opened in January 2021 and is now part of Army Transformation and Training Command.
What is 8090?
8090 is a company that sells the 8090 Software Factory, which its website calls "the AI-native SDLC platform" for refining intent, governing execution, verifying outputs and keeping the audit trail. Its method runs in four stages: Requirements, Blueprints, Work Orders and Feedback.
About the author
Ankit Kumar
Software Engineer, Bug0
Ankit is a software engineer at Bug0 with a background in Computer Science and Engineering. Before Bug0 he worked with startups and took on freelance projects across the frontend, the backend and databases. He now works mostly on backend systems and DevOps on AWS, digging into internals to make them faster and more reliable, and writes about backend engineering, test infrastructure and applied AI.
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