Case-based management of software engineering experienceware

Abstract

Due to increasing demands of the market, the ability of software companies to build up and reuse Software Engineering know-how promoting organizational learning is becoming essential for competitive advantage. Therefore, learning knowledge-based systems have to be operationalized in industrial environments providing integrated support for capturing, storing and retrieving software engineering knowledge. Technical support is complicated through specific characteristics of the software engineering domain, such as the lack of explicit domain models in practice, the diversity of environments and the great variety of application goals, which have to be supported. This paper presents a case-based reasoning approach for the representation of relevant software engineering experiences, the goal-oriented and similarity-based retrieval tailorable to organization-specific characteristics and the continuous acquisition and integration of new experiences. The approach is applied and validated in the context of the Goal/Question/Metric approach, an innovative technology for software measurement. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2000.