A Process to Reuse Experiences via Narratives among Software Project Managements

Organizations have lost billions of dollars due to poor software project implementations. Software project management is a complex process requiring extensive planning, effective decision-making, and proper monitoring throughout the course of the project. The knowledge one gains during a project is rarely captured and reused on subsequent projects. In an effort to enable software project managers to repeat prior successes and avoid previous mistakes, this research seeks to improve the reuse of a specific type of knowledge among software project managers, experiences expressed via written narratives. This research proposes that software project managers can improve their management abilities by reusing their own and others’ past experiences using written narratives. This research leverages multiple methodologies – including tool evaluation, grounded theory, design science research, and experimentation – throughout the phases of a design science research framework to create a process to enable software project managers to reuse knowledge gained through experiences on software projects. Guided by the design science research framework, this work leverages both explanation research – to understand the phenomenon of knowledge reuse among software project managers – and design science research – to create a process to facilitate knowledge reuse among software project managers – in an attempt to improve upon the current practices of software project management.