Vic Basili's Experience Base Papers

It's impossible to discuss a piece of Vic's work without relating it to the other pieces. Everything fits together within an overall strategy of applying the empirical scientific method to the challenge of continuously improving an organization's software processes and products. The Goal-Question-Metric approach recognizes that "improvement" requires metrics, but that every organization has its own set of goals and environmental influences. This means that "improvement" metrics may be anything from meaningless to dysfunctional if they aren't related to the organization's goals and to questions about the organization's current state and evolving environment. The Quality Improvement Paradigm recognizes that continuous process and product improvement needs to fit within a framework involving the scientific method of hypothesis formulation, test, and closed-loop feedback control. The Experience Factory recognizes that continuous improvement, as with any other investment to achieve results, should have a business plan, management commitment to the plan, and an infrastructure of policies, processes, procedures, facilities, tools, management information systems, stafEng, training, and incentives to get best results. The S o h a r e Engineering Laboratory (SEL) has been a marvelous example of successfUlly applying, evaluating, learning about, and evolving all of these concepts and capabilities in the area of software development and evolution. It justly deserved being the first recipient of the IEEE Software Process Achievement Award. In this context, a narrow definition of an Experience Base is that it serves as the management information system for the continuous process and product improvement enterprise. This includes the data definitions, data base organization and content, database management capabilities, and analysis tools for formulating, testing, and evolving hypotheses about improving the organization's processes and products. But I think a broader definition is more appropriate; the entire infrastructure of product, process, data, and personnel assets that evolve to enable the organization to most rapidly and costeffectively improve its capabilities to adapt to its changing goals and environment.