Goal-oriented Organizational Learning with the SFB 501 Experience Base

Reusing experience in the form of processes, products, and other forms of knowledge is essential for improvement, in other words: reuse of knowledge is the basis for improvement [4]. Approaches to systematically support reuse are the Quality Improvement Paradigm and the Experience Factory. This paper describes experiences with the application of these approaches to the project CoDEx, which was aimed at developing a real-time house automation system. A model for representing and maintaining software engineering knowledge is shown, as well as a prototype implementation of an experience base which is tailored to a research environment. Subsequently, the execution of the project is described. The focus is put on the reuse and experience-based modification of an effort model. Lessons learned and benefits achieved are discussed. First experiences showed on the one hand that the application of the approaches supported the project planning enormously. On the other hand, process, product, knowledge, and quality models need to be better defined according to the evolutionary nature of software development. Based on experiences, possible improvements of our experience base implementation are described.