The relationship between the application software development process and its enabling foundation, software development infrastructure (SDI), is discussed everywhere in the literature, but this discussion is very disjointed. Yet the failure to coherently understand the technical and managerial issues associated with SDI is one of the reason for the poor state of software development practice in the 1990s. The purpose of this article is to address the issues associated with providing and sustaining an effective substructure for software development. The continued demand for organizations to achieve a higher return on their software investments is causing them to rethink the current practices of their software development efforts. The conceptual framework of SDI presented in this article provides a starting point for the organizations to identify the required infrastructure components in the effort to architect an effective foundation for the business process of software development.