A Representation Formalism for Supporting Reuse of Software Engineering Knowledge

To transfer innovative software technologies into practice and to continuously improve the software quality and productivity, software-related knowledge should be reused. Therefore, software organizations require support for collecting systematically experiences from their projects, packaging those experiences to build up software-related knowledge, and in validating and reusing knowledge in future software development projects. In this paper, the representation formalism REFSENO is presented for specifying domain-specific software engineering knowledge. Such knowledge is conceptualized explicitly in the form of software engineering ontologies as a means for the development and communication of structure models for an organization-wide experience base. Through clearly defined primitives and operations on the knowledge representation, REFSENO provides a means to operationalize such a repository based on the ontology definition. REFSENO supports the development of experience bases and pr ovides the means for checking the modeled domain knowledge for completeness and consistency. The representation formalism has been validated through the GQM planning ontology (GQM is an innovative technology for software engineering measurement) from which excerpts are presented in this paper to exemplify the primitives of REFSENO.