Today, the "breakout" sessions begun. In other words, we started drilling down with the product groups; for me that is Solution Architect. Some of the sessions I can't even name as even the code words are not public but I did want to mention that we had a great session and discussion (on the present) with Jack Greenfield on "The Future of Software Factories and Q &A with Jack Greenfield." Leaving out the future, we had a great discussion on a topic I generated when I told Jack that although I buy the notion totally of Software Factories (we use WSSF, CAB, Smart Client Factory to mention just a few) I had a really hard time buying the notion of Software Product Lines as it really smacked to me of Big Design Up Front, something I abhor as an Agile Architect. The answer was a good one, revolving around the idea of harvesting best practices, frameworks, etc of Product #1, #2 and it doesn't have to be some huge heavyweight notion of designing the product line in advance. I think that's how I understood it.

Also, see Jeremy's excellent discussion of this as well.

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