Facilitating experience reuse among software project managers

Abstract

Organizations have lost billions of dollars due to poor software project implementations. 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 in the form of narratives. To meet this goal, we identify a set of design principles for facilitating experience reuse based on the knowledge management literature. Guided by these principles we develop a model called Experience Exchange for facilitating the reuse of experiences in the form of narratives. We also provide a proof-of-concept instantiation of a critical component of the Experience Exchange model, the Experience Exchange Library. We evaluate the Experience Exchange model theoretically and empirically. We conduct a theoretical evaluation by ensuring that our model complies with the design principles identified from the literature. We also perform an experiment, using the developed instantiation of the Experience Exchange Library, to evaluate if technology can serve as a medium for transferring experiences across software projects. © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.