Intelligent Retrieval of Software Engineering Experienceware

For the continuous improvement of quality and productivity in software development, organizations have to build up a specific body of software engineering know-how. Software know-how has to be systematically collected from projects, stored in a corporate memory, and shared across the organization. To support and guide software projects, useful experiences have to be identified and retrieved from the knowledge base. As support is required for different processes, purposes, and environments, the usefulness of retrieved experiences depends mainly on the particular reuse situation. Thus, a flexible retrieval method and similarity measure is required, which can be continuously tailored to the specific situation based on feedback from its application in practice. This paper proposes a case-based approach for the retrieval of software engineering experienceware taking into account those specific characteristics of the software engineering domain, such as the lack of explicit domain models in practice, diversity of environments and software processes to be supported, incompleteness of data, and the consideration of similarity of experiences.