Knowledge Management for Building Learning Software Organizations

Due to the steadily increasing demands of the market, strategic management of knowledge assets, or Learning Organizations, are becoming a must in industrial software development. This paper presents work done at Fraunhofer IESE, where learning organizations for software development organizations are being developed and transferred into industrial practice. It describes how learning organizations for the software domain can be built upon both mature approaches from Software Engineering like the Experience Factory Model and industrial strength technology from knowledge management. A system to support the Learning Software Organization is sketched and experiences regarding the implementation of this system and learning software organizations in general are presented.