Software factory a higher education road map.

For a long time, software engineering has been considered as a highlight driver of development and business support. Software development carries on some issues like high cost and failure projects. These issues have opened new challenges for several scholars and researchers; however, today software crisis continues. Software Factories presents a solution to improve software production and, to face those challenges especially to face de new develop AI-based applications requirements. This work aimed to develop a road map for building Software Factories inside higher education institutions. A design-based research (DBR) methodological approach has been used to build the proposed model. The methodological approach includes four steps: i) design, ii) test, iii) evaluate, and iv) reflect; these steps are repeated several times until they get the best outcomes and learning; a couple of iterations have been executed for testing the model. Early outcomes showed that: i) Building business software components have been the base for developing Software Factories (SF); hence the SF could permit to increase the students' professional skills and, at the same time to, get a broad of opportunities for linking with the industry. ii) The process for building components recommended a set of steps: model requirements, data collection, data cleaning, data labeling, feature engineering, training model, model evaluation, model deployment, and model monitoring. And, iii) during testing time, students showed an increase in their academic and professional skills in the field of the software industry. In conclusion, new trends increasing the fast-changing technical environments foster the development of components nowadays; therefore, a more substantial nexus between higher education and software development practice should be created to improve software mass production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]