Transferring and Evolving Experience. A Practical Approach and its Application on Software Inspections

Experience and knowledge management are seen as key capabilities for systematic software development and process improvement. However, it is still not quite clear, how to get this vision to work. In this paper, a process for systematic experience transfer is presented. It covers the activities of experience acquisition, experience documentation and evolution, and experience reuse. This process is a result of the German publicly-funded project SoftQuali, and its practical use is demonstrated by two real project examples, dealing with experience transfer for software inspections. It is described how experience can be packaged, both to transfer the technique and to improve it.