An Overview of the Software Engineering Laboratory

Foreword The Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL) is an organization sponsored by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration/Goddard Space Flight Center (NASA/GSFC) and created to investigate the effectiveness of software engineering technologies when applied to the development of applications software. The SEL was created in 1976 and has three primary organizational members: The goals of the SEL are (1) to understand the software development process in the GSFC environment; (2) to measure the effect of various methodologies, tools, and models on the process; and (3) to identify and then to apply successful development practices. The activities, findings, and recommendations of the SEL are recorded in the Software Engineering Laboratory Series, a continuing series of reports that includes this document. Abstract This report describes the background and structure of the SEL organization, the SEL process improvement approach, and its experimentation and data collection process. Results of some sample SEL studies are included. It includes a discussion of the overall implication of trends observed over 17 years of process improvement efforts and looks at the return on investment based on a comparison of the total investment in process improvement with the measurable improvements seen in the organization's software product.