Process model reuse to promote organizational learning in software development

Abstract

Software development often suffers from well-known problems such as wrong schedules and cost estimations, low productivity, and low product quality. In order to overcome these problems we suggest adapting the concepts of "organizational memory" and "organizational learning" and we argue in favor of establishing a reuse culture of software process models. We introduce an approach based on the process definition/instantiation/enaction paradigm and on the reuse of explicit software process descriptions (process models). The key features of our approach are the division of process descriptions into a goal-oriented process definition document and a formal implementation-oriented process model on the one hand and the use of an artificial neural network, more precisely a self-organizing map, for classification and retrieval purposes on the other. We present an exposition of our approach and discuss the promising results of an experiment in structuring a software process library and retrieving reuse candidates for upcoming projects.