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| December 14, 2026 |
| A Software Factory Build Report: What Worked, What Broke, What I'd Do Again |
| We are happy to announce that Simon Maple will be our special guest for this month's meeting. |
| Software factories aren't a research demo. At Tessl we run one that merges over 1,000 PRs a week, as well as maintenance agents that raise their own issues on the factory itself, and creates changes that merge without us ever knowing they exist. |
| In this session I'll present a full, honest account of the building an autonomous issue-to-PR factory for an open-source learning platform which we built for our users on our site. I'll show why a factory is never built in one go, but rather an iterative system that earns maturity layer by layer, and I'll give you a concrete path to grow that maturity safely rather than trusting too much too soon. I'll share the decisions that paid off (versioned review lenses, deterministic gates), and the ones that cost us. |
| I'll show a practical example of turning an open source Java application which is manually build into one that can have PRs created from issues via a software factory that we'll build. We'll identify where autonomy is possible while identifying where a human still has to step in, and how the developer's job quietly shifted from writing code to architecting changes to the app via issues. The goal is to give you a realistic build plan for your applications, identifying potholes, so you can follow the same route with fewer scars. |