Aggregation of experiences in experience factories into software patterns

Abstract

In software engineering Experience Factories have been in use for a long time to store and manage experiences from software projects, typically in large organizations. Beside the preservation of quantitative or numerical experiences, e.g., in form of project effort data or data from empirical studies, many experience facto-ries also preserve subjective or qualitative experiences, e.g., in form of observations or lessons learned from the projects. A key issue of experience management is to aggregate these documented experiences into more valuable software patterns. In this article we report about the aggregation (i.e., formalization and generalization) of documented experiences in an experience factory to software patterns. Observations from real-world projects are formalized (i.e., structurally contextualized) into semi-formal experiences and, over time, several similar of these experiences are generalized (i.e., systematically de-contextualized) into software patterns.