The architects of the Software Factories method provide a detailed look at this faster, less expensive, and more reliable approach to application development. Software Factories significantly increase the level of automation in application development at medium to large companies, applying the time tested pattern of using visual languages to enable rapid assembly and configuration of framework based components.Unlike other approaches to Model Driven Development (MDD), such as Model Driven Architecture (MDA) from the Object Management Group (OMG), Software Factories do not use the Unified Modeling Language (UML), a general purpose modeling language designed for models used as documentation. They go beyond models as documentation, using models based on highly tuned Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) and the Extensible Markup Language (XML) as source artifacts, to capture life cycle metadata, and to support high fidelity model transformation, code generation and other forms of automation.