Accumulated empirical data, information, models, knowledge, experience, (called experience from here on) are collected in an Experience Base that is available primarily to collaborators of CeBASE and secondarily to the general public.  

The content of the Experience Base will initially be based on experience stemming from previous and current work conducted by CeBASE founders, for example COTS based and Defect reduction techniques. In the future we expect collaborators of CeBASE (researchers, educators, and practitioners) to collaborate in various groups and share experience within and outside those groups.

The infrastructure of the Experience Base is based on the ideas of the Experience Factory approach, which defines a framework for Experience Management. The Experience Factory fosters organizational learning, which means that the organization manages and learns from its own experience. The Experience Factory approach teaches the organization to observe itself, collect data about itself, build models and draw conclusions based on the data, package the experience for further reuse, and most importantly to feed the experience back to the organization and for sharing it within and outside the organization.

The Experience Factory approach has been successfully applied to different organizational settings. It has been applied by individual organizations for utilizing their own experience and sharing experience within the organization, such as NASA GSFC. It has also been applied to groups of organizations for inter-organizational sharing of and learning from experience, such as the Software Engineering Center (SEC) consortium.

The Experience Factory approach was designed for software organizations and takes into account the software discipline’s experimental, evolutionary, and non-repetitive characteristics.

The Experience Base helps organizations improve their experience management by implementing a framework for sharing experience within the organization as well as within the community.

The eBASE team of CeBASE is responsible for providing this environment of experience sharing to the community. Our goal is to develop the procedures, structure and tools that are needed to implement a successful Experience Base making it easy to collaborate and share experience.

Some of the research questions that the eBASE team is trying to answer are:

• How do we create a truly useful Experience Base?
• How do we enable people to collaborate and share experience?
• What do different user groups (researchers, educators, practitioners) need in terms of tools, processes, and experience in order to do their work in a more efficient way?

The tools we are currently working on that constitute the components of the CeBASE Experience Base are the following:

• An Experience Base and collaboration tool based on Frequently Asked Questions
• An Experience Base for Lessons Learned
• A system for managing and tailoring Software Engineering processes (BORE)
• A system for accessing, managing and analyzing Experience Bases (VQI)
• A system for managing and sharing technical reports
• A system for running eWorkshop
• A general collaboration and sharing environment (Hyperwave Information Server)

We are also researching tools and techniques for analyzing and synthesizing Experience, and systems for Analysis and Discovery Management.

Please contact Mikael Lindvall (mlindvall@fc-md.umd.edu )

• If you are interested in knowing more about the eBASE team and the Experience Base, or
• If you are a potential user of the Experience Base and want to discuss requirements of the Experience Base, or
• If you have experience that you want to contribute to the Experience Base, or
• If you want to contribute to the design and implementation of the Experience Base

For more information about the Experience Base and our work:

• Implementing an Internet-Enabled Software Experience Factory
• An Experience Management System for a Software Consulting Organization
• A Prototype Experience Management System for a Software Consulting Organization
• Implementing the Experience Factory concepts as a set of Experience Bases
• An Analysis of Three Experience Bases
• Building an Experience Base for Software Engineering: A report on the first CeBASE eWorkshop
• An Experience Management System for a Software Engineering Research Organization
• Success Criteria for Software Experience Bases: What We Need to Learn from Other Disciplines
• Empirical Findings in Agile Methods

Search for more papers and the complete references of the above papers here: Click here