Archive for April, 2011
The Experience Factory
During the literature study of my Ph.D. thesis I came across an interesting concept, which I would like to briefly write about here. Even before the term knowledge management became popular, Victor R. Basili presented his experience factory [1].
The principle behind that is that a software developing organization should gather the gained experience and make it accessible to learn from it in the future. To archive that, the whole idea builds upon a division of responsibilities. On the one hand there is the project organization, which covers the project work and tasks. On the other hand is the experience factory, which encapsulates the whole experience recording and leveraging for the whole organization.
In the experience factory all kinds of experience that can be externalized and made available are analysed and synthesised. That includes the outcome of project reviews or documentation. This is then taken and bundled into standardized packages, in order to make the experience easier to access. Developers can thus access these experience packages in the experience base, once they feel the need for further input. At the end of every learning process, the developer has to feed the gained insights back into the experience base, to make it richer. The methodology thus applies the two basic activities in knowledge management: collecting experience and learning to improve.
The experience factory is a widely known concept and implemented in different organizations. The most famous one is the Software Engineering Laboratory at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, which documents a dramatic increase of reuse across different projects [2]. It can be seen though, that it is difficult to implement and contains a huge organizational overhead. But the principles applied make a lot of sense. It is worth thinking about it, I suppose.
[1] Victor R. Basili. »Software Development: A Paradigm for the Future«, Proceedings of the 13th Annual International Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC 89), 1989.
[2] Victor R. Basili and Gianluigi Caldiera. »Improve Software Quality by Reusing Knowledge and Experience«, Sloan Management Review, Fall 1995.
The KiWi Project
My PhD studies were held within a project, funded by the European Commission: The KiWi Project – Knowledge in a Wiki
Within this project the participants created a wiki-based collaboration system, utilizing the theories of the semantic web. The consortium consisted from Brno University of Technology (Czech Republic), Logica (Aalborg, Denmark), Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich (Germany), Oracle/Sun (Prague, Czech Republic), Salzburg Research (Austria), Semantic Web Company (Vienna, Austria) and Aalborg University (Denmark). The project was organized in the developing branch and two use cases, where the possibilities and benefits in two companies should be investigated. My research was located in one of these, the Use Case on Software Project Management Knowledge with Logica.
Parts of the KiWi core development were the so called Enabling Technologies. These provide certain features to the KiWi platform, namely Information Extraction, Personalization & Adaptation, Querying & Reasoning and Reason Maintenance.
Since March 1st is the project over. The KiWi has landed. I was part of the consortium’s representatives at the final review meeting on Monday at the European Union’s buildings in Luxembourg. And even though their final official statements will be part of a report that is yet to come, I believe that generally the project can be valued quite positive and successful.
Not only has the KiWi project been very exciting, it also provided a lot of opportunities. I was able to meet and work with all these interesting people across Europe. And I also got in touch with (for me) new and fascinating topics. I’m grateful for that and say: Thank you KiWi!
The KiWi however is far from dead. During the project a community began to be formed. Moderated by the people at Salzburg Research the KiWi system takes off to its second version soon. If you want to participate in the open source world, have a look at the KiWi Community.