Building an Experience-Base for Product-line Software Development Process

Accumulating and managing development experiences plays a key role in improving software quality and process. The experience factory paradigm provides an organizational approach for extracting development experiences from current software product-line projects and supplying the experiences to future projects. The paradigm relies upon accumulating experiences and storing them in a repository, the experience base. Due to the complexity of the software process, it is difficult to establish and effectively provide operational support for the experience base. This paper presents an approach to the implementation of the experience base along with an automated decision support system using Case-Based Reasoning. The paper covers the activities of case acquisition and representation. We also describe how this experience base can be used as a decision support system for software project managers in day-to-day development activities. The paper concludes with an evaluation of our approach to date and a description of future research directions.