An Infrastructure for Indexing and Organizing Best Practices

Industry best practices are widely held but not necessarily empirically verified software engineering beliefs. Best practices can be documented in distributed web-based public repositories as pattern catalogues or practice libraries. There is a need to systematically index and organize these practices to enable their better practical use and scientific evaluation. In this paper, we propose a semi-automatic approach to index and organise best practices. A central repository acts as an information overlay on top of other pre-existing resources to facilitate organization, navigation, annotation and meta-analysis while maintaining synchronization with those resources. An initial population of the central repository is automated using Yahoo! contextual search services. The collected data is organized using semantic web technologies so that the data can be more easily shared and used for innovative analyses. A prototype has demonstrated the capability of the approach.