Supporting Software Development with Organizational Memory Tools

Software development is no longer a homogeneous field. Software is being developed for an increasingly diverse set of applications and user populations, each with different characteristics and development constraints. As a consequence, researchers and practitioners have begun to realize the importance of identifying and understanding the characteristics and special development needs of application domains. But domain analysis methods have largely focused on identifying and isolating a domain to organize source code components. A broader view is needed that defines “domains ” to be problem with similar characteristics and that captures the various knowledge needed to develop software applications, such as application domain knowledge and tips and techniques for development tools. This paper describes a software development support system for collecting, organizing, and disseminating project experiences that provides the basis for domain analysis techniques supporting the re-use of development knowledge and software artifacts. Subsequent projects benefit from these experiences by using tools to locate similar projects and reusing the knowledge accumulated in the repository. We develop a framework for a system to capture relationships between development projects and resources for developing software, including process models, methods, technologies, and tools. We then show how this information can be reused to improve the productivity and quality of software development efforts