Knowledge Management of Software Engineering Lessons Learned

Reuse of lessons learned from past software projects promotes good software development practices and prevents the repetition of mistakes. However, the lessons learned during a software project remain far too often isolated in the minds of the project participants. There is a need to systematically gain, store, disseminate, and apply them. This paper presents a method for integrated knowledge management of lessons learned in software engineering that covers all these aspects. It presents a technical infrastructure and an organizational infrastructure for knowledge management of lessons learned. The results were derived and validated using three application case studies.