Experience Factory

Abstract

Reuse of products, processes, and experience originating from the system life cycle is seen today as a feasible solution to the problem of developing higher quality systems at a lower cost. In fact, quality improvement is very often achieved by repeatedly reusing and modifying the same elements, learning about them by direct experience. This article presents an infrastructure, called the experience factory , aimed at capitalization and reuse of life‐cycle experience and products. The experience factory is a logical and physical organization, and its activities are independent from those of the development organization. The activities of the development organization and of the experience factory can be summarized as follows: The development organization develops and delivers systems with the aid of analyzed, synthesized, and packaged experiences from the experience factory. It provides the experience factory with raw project information such as developmental and environmental characteristics, product parts, processes, and resource and defect data, representing the project being developed. The experience factory supports project developments with direct feedback by analyzing and synthesizing all kinds of experiences gathered from projects as well as other state‐of‐the‐practice notions and acting as a repository for such experiences. These experiences include locally calibrated cost estimation models, processes demonstrated effective for the development environment, relevant products and product parts, and quality models.

COTS-based software development: Processes and open issues

“…According to the Quality Improvement Paradigm (Basili et al, 1994), the study is an iteration of understanding, experimenting and packaging phases. During the last few months of 1995, the SEL designed an initial COTS-based process.…”

An exploration of the extent to which project management tools and techniques can be applied across creative industries through a study of their application in the fashion industry in the North East of Scotland

“…Post-project evaluation and the application of lessons learnt are fundamental tools in project management, (Basili et al, 2002). Participants tended not to carry out mid-project reviews, but in all instances carried out a post-project evaluation.…”

An Approach from Knowledge Dust to Gems (Knowledge Management)

“…Cultivating knowledge Gems can be a relatively sophisticated activity that can take time. Therefore, it is conducted by the Experience Factory (Basili et al, 1994) group which specializes in analysis and synthesis techniques, such as qualitative and quantitative analysis, statistical methods and models based on empirical data. The Gems are fed back into the experience base for future use by both the project organization and the EF group.…”

“…Knowledge management can be applied by any kind of organization that needs to manage its knowledge. The experience factory (Basili et al, 1994) is an example of a knowledge management approach especially designed for software organizations. The Experience Factory recognizes that organizations need to learn from their past experiences in order to deliver products faster, cheaper and with higher quality than before.…”