Experience Factory
Victor Robert Basili, Gianluigi Caldiera, H. Dieter Rombach · Encyclopedia of Software Engineering · 2002
Abstract Reuse of products, processes, and experience originating from the system life cycle is seen today as a feasible solution to the problem of developing higher quality systems at a lower cost. In fact, quality improvement is very often achieved by repeatedly reusing and modifying the same elements, learning about them by direct experience. This article presents an infrastructure, called the experience factory , aimed at capitalization and reuse of life‐cycle experience and products. The experience factory is a logical and physical organization, and its activities are independent from those of the development organization. The activities of the development organization and of the experience factory can be summarized as follows: The development organization develops and delivers systems with the aid of analyzed, synthesized, and packaged experiences from the experience factory. It provides the experience factory with raw project information such as developmental and environmental characteristics, product parts, processes, and resource and defect data, representing the project being developed. The experience factory supports project developments with direct feedback by analyzing and synthesizing all kinds of experiences gathered from projects as well as other state‐of‐the‐practice notions and acting as a repository for such experiences. These experiences include locally calibrated cost estimation models, processes demonstrated effective for the development environment, relevant products and product parts, and quality models.