Authors: Pavan Kumar Maddali, Satish Chandra, Shankar Kambhampaty
Description Practitioners and researchers in the software industry have been comparing, from time to time, the state of the software engineering discipline to mature disciplines like civil, mechanical and electronics engineering. Efforts have been made to emulate the best practices in the other disciplines so as to deliver robust products and solutions with ease and at lower costs. Popular among the several ideas borrowed from other disciplines are the concepts of design patterns from the civil and components from the electronics. The idea of having an ideal software factory that resembles the assembly line of a manufacturing environment has been proposed and discussed, time and again. These environments comprise of physical work places and each of the work places has an implied concept of a workbench, to help the employee who is responsible for some predetermined output. The workbench could be automated or semi-automated or manual.