Overview

Introduction to CeBASE

Background
Software development is a people- and knowledge-intensive activity; it is a rapidly changing field, and although it is slowly maturing, many activities are still ad hoc and depend upon personal experiences. In order to cope with such restrictions as firm deadlines and shrinking budgets, software-developing organizations need assistance in setting up and running increasingly critical projects.
In order to reach their goals, software development teams need to understand and choose the right models and techniques to support their projects.

They must answer key questions such as:

What is the best life-cycle process model to choose for this particular project?
What is an appropriate balance of effort between inspections and testing in a specific context?
What are the benefits, if any, to buy a readily available software component instead of developing it?

CeBASE
The Center for Empirically-Based Software Engineering (CeBASE) was organized to support software organizations in answering the key questions. CeBASE accumulates empirical models in order to provide validated guidelines for selecting techniques and models, recommend areas for research, and support software engineering education. CeBASE’s objective is to transform software engineering from a fad-based practice to an engineering-based discipline in which development processes are selected based on what is known about their effects on products, through synthesis, derivation, organization, and dissemination of empirical knowledge on software development and evolution phenomenology.