Success Factors for Software Experience Bases: What We Need to Learn from Other Disciplines

The interest for Software Experience Bases is rapidly growing as software companies recognize the need among software developers to share experiences with each other. This need is especially strong within large companies that are geographically spread out. However, there are several interesting questions connected to the implementation of software experience bases. Questions are for example: how do we best externalize experience (i.e. capture, package, structure, and classify experience)? When the experience is externalized the question is how to best enable internalization of the experience (i.e. how do we enable people to use and learn from the experience)? The paper discusses success factors for software experience bases for organizational learning and what we need to learn from other disciplines in order to better understand how to deal with these questions. A survey of some previous efforts in the area is presented. Based on the survey, we formulate four success factors for software experience bases. These are: 1) a successful implementation of a software experience base requires cultural changes, 2) the business environment should be relatively stable, 3) a software experience base should offer concrete business value, and 4) the implementation and introduction of a software experience base should be done in an incremental fashion.