An Experience Management System for a Software Consulting Organization

Software is a major expense for most organizations and is on the critical path to almost all organizational activities. Individual software development organizations in general strive to develop higher quality systems at a lower cost for both their internal and external customers. Yet the processes used to develop such software are still very primitive in the way that experience is incorporated. Learning is often from scratch, and each new development team has to relearn the mistakes of its predecessors. Reuse of an organization’s own products, processes, and experience is becoming more accepted as a feasible solution to this problem. But implementation of the idea, in most cases, has not gone beyond reuse of small-scale code components in very specific, well-defined, situations. True learning within a software development organization requires that organizational experiences, both technological and social, be analyzed and synthesized so that members of the organization can learn from them and apply them to new problems.