Design of experience base model for software process improvement

Abstract

Software has become woven into the threads of our daily lives. It has become an inherent constituent of survival for almost all organisations as well as for individuals in today’s world of competition. May it be telecommunications, transportation, medical services or the defence of a nation, software is a critical component. Software also plays a vital operational and strategic role enabling organisations to meet challenges of flexibility and time-to-market, and to reduce costs and maintain quality. With Internet and mobile technologies becoming omnipresent, and growing use of embedded software in consumer products, individuals are increasingly becoming dependent on software. For this ever increasing dependence over software, problems in developing software can have ravaging effects not only at individual and organisational levels but also at national and international levels. As a result, the improvement of software development processes has become the pressing area of concern for software engineering professionals and researchers. For a long time the general public view of the software engineering profession has been the delayed projects and poor quality software and the field is overwhelmed with reports of software projects missing their deadlines, surpassing their budgets, delivery of poor quality software and dissatisfied clients. Learning in software development teams is often from scratch and each team has to relearn the mistakes of its predecessors. Reuse of small-scale code components has been practiced in some situations but systematic learning from organisation’s own products, processes and experience is still uncommon. For the continuous improvement of software process, the knowledge and experience of its employees can not be overemphasized in an organisation. Large amounts of knowledge in the form of project data, lessons learnt, software artifacts, code libraries etc. could be accumulated for a software organisation but to make this knowledge usable, it needs to be structured, organized, modeled and stored in a generalized and reusable form in an organisational repository, called the ‘experience base.’ Experiences, when reused in their original context, can direct achievement in quality and improvement in software process. However, learning and reuse of experience usually only occur because of individual efforts or by accident. This necessarily leads to a loss of the experience and knowledge after the completion of the project and, therefore, a reuse-oriented software development process in which learning and feedback are regarded as integrated components, and experiences are stored in an experience base, is potentially the best solution. Reuse of experience in SE environments requires that processes and products from software development projects are systematically collected, packaged and stored in an experience base.