College of Engineering Software Factory

Historically, teams of developers built software, then operations teams deployed the software into production. Modern software development merges the two teams to ease transition from development to deployment. Thus, to be competitive in the workforce, software engineers need experience defining software requirements, developing architectural and detailed design models, writing code, creating automated tests and building scripts within a DevOps pipeline.

This team designed, built and tested a cloud-based platform, commonly referred to as a software factory, to help students in the college’s software engineering degree program gain these experiences.

The engineering software factory has a minimum of one software tool for each phase of the software development life cycle and can easily be expanded to support additional tools. The software factory supports a continuous integration/continuous development DevOps pipeline, mirroring modern practices and automation. The team developed a containerized microservice architecture using Docker to provide scalable resource allocation depending on student demand. The platform is hosted on the College of Engineering’s high-performance computing network, maximizing the power of idle servers. The team then built the front-end graphical user interface for students to easily access the cloud-based software development environment.