Introduction of the the software assembly line reference model

In this day and age organisations rely on software to govern their business and assure their business continuity. Most organisations can rely on COTS software packages to provide this assurance. However some organisations rely on software developments teams to create bespoke software components. This happens in most cases if a COTS software package is not available for specific business functions or the available packages don’t fit the organisation’s enterprise architecture, which was created to meet the organisation’s strategic business objectives.

However setting up a software development environment which supports software development teams is an engineering challenge on its own. For this reason organisation may decide to out-source software development to a system integration partner and rely and trust the partner’s capability in this engineering area. If an organisation recons they are up-to the challenge, a software development capability will have to be organized.

For both situations the Software Assembly Line Reference Model is used to asses, organize and improve an organisation’s software engineering capability.