Industrial fabrication laboratories (fablabs), located in real production environments, represent important sites of cyber-physical systems research and development for the smart fac-tory of the future. This paper takes a closer look at how soft-ware is being developed in industrial fablabs by the example of a smart factory project conducted by a large company in Eu-rope. We find that, when developing software for the shopfloor on the shopfloor, teams tend to adapt or drift away from well-established software engineering methods and practices im-promptu in order to cope with the seemingly arcane physical and social environment of the factory.