In this paper we report results of an informal field study of a software development team conducted during an eight week internship at the NASA/Ames Research Center. The team develops a suite of tools called MVP, and is composed of 31 co-located software engineers, who design, test, document, and maintain the different MVP tools. We describe the formal and informal approaches used by this group...

Experience-based approaches to software development promise to capture critical knowledge from software projects that can be used as a basis for continuous improvement of software development practices. Putting these ideas into practice in the quickly evolving discipline of software engineering has proven elusive. Techniques and tools are needed that help software practitioners apply past knowl...

We examine the problems encountered in evolving software development tools, in particular, configuration management tools, drawing on our experience in producing the DaSC configuration management toolset. Building good software development tools is a time-consuming, iterative process where the tool designers must take into account the evolving nature of the software development process embodied...

In many papers describing parallel programming tools, the authors illustrate the strengths of their approach by presenting some impressive speedup results. However, is this the only metric by which we should judge the quality of their tool? Many of these tools offer significant software engineering advantages that reduce program development time and increase code reliability. This paper uses th...