Managing Software Engineering Experience for Comprehensive Reuse

Today's software developments are faced with steadily increasing expectations: software has to be developed faster, better, and cheaper. At the same time, application complexity increases. Meeting these demands requires fast, continuous learning and the reuse of past experience on the part of the project teams. Thus, learning and reuse should be supported by well-defined processes applicable to all kinds of experience which are stored in an organizational memory. In this paper, we introduce a tool architecture supporting continuous learning and reuse of all kinds of experience from the software engineering domain, present the underlying methodology, and point out organizational aspects to be considered. To be effective, queries of an organizational memory should also return useful experience that users did not expect to find. In our approach, such intelligent retrieval is realized using context-sensitive queries and similarity functions based on case-based reasoning technology. Retriev al and storage are guided by a predefined schema. This schema also ensures the consistency of the organizational memory. The guidance and consistency aid in effective and efficient learning. Maintaining an organizational memory, however, requires an organizational unit separate from projects: an experience factory. Our approach is based on many transfer projects employing the experience factory concept. It is scalable in terms of the diversity and formality of the artifacts stored, as well as in terms of the diversity of artifact-specific tools. Several projects are presented to demonstrate the suitability of the approach.