Software engineering knowledge repositories

In order to improve the maturity and competitiveness of software intensive organizations, there is a need to efficiently share experiences about best software engineering practices, their benefits as well as their context requirements and boundaries. Such knowledge enables companies to improve faster and at lower cost. Many such experiences exist locally either in individual companies or departments - derived via case studies in projects, or in research organizations - derived via controlled technology experiments. Supporting the extraction of experiences, their packaging for cross-organization reuse, and making them available from a central storage are (some) of the chal-lenges a cross-organization knowledge repository faces. Therefore it has to provide at least a technical infrastructure and organizational support for acquiring, using, maintaining, and evolving relevant knowledge. This chapter describes an empirically validated approach to the design, construction, and evaluation of software engineering repositories, alongside an example of the construction and the evaluation of the ESERNET knowledge repository.