Acquiring knowledge for linking software engineering experience maintenance with evaluation

The value of a software engineering experience repository like for any other experience-based information systems tends to degrade with time. To keep the value of such a system, evaluation and maintenance is an essential. While evaluation monitors the "value" over time, maintenance has to preserve or improve this "value". Evaluation and maintenance should not simply happen ad-hoc but systematically and based on specific quality and maintenance knowledge, which is linked to base maintenance on evaluation. As a jump-start for evaluation and maintenance, the respective knowledge should be available right from the start of continuous operation. This paper describes how to acquire and develop such maintenance knowledge during system buildup to use and improve this knowledge during continuous operation for combined human- and computer-based maintenance. The described approach has been successfully applied in several projects. The method is illustrated with examples from two of these projects as case studies.