Packaging and disseminating lessons learned from COTS-based software development

The appropriate management of experience and knowledge has become a crucially important capability for organizations of all types and software organizations are no exception. We describe an initiative aimed at helping the software engineering community share experience, in the form of lessons learned. The Center for Empirically Based Software Engineering (CeBASE) COTS lessons learned repository (CLLR) is described, including its motivation, its current status and capabilities, and the plans for its evolution. The contribution of this work lies not only in the approach itself and its validation, but also in the creation of a community of interest, which is fundamental in order to ensure the success of such an initiative. The knowledge and experience that are captured, carefully processed, and made available to the software engineering community also form part of this contribution. The community is supported by eWorkshops that bring COTS experts together, letting them discuss, share, and synthesize COTS knowledge. This knowledge is analyzed, refined and shared through the repository, which is designed to be self-monitoring in several ways. It provides several mechanisms for users to provide feedback, both in the form of new lessons learned and additional insight into existing lessons in the repository. This feedback is used to shape the repository contents and capabilities over time. Also, the repository itself tracks its own usage patterns in order to better assess and meet the needs of its users. Although the focus of the CLLR has been on COTS based software development, the technologies and approaches we have employed are applicable to any sub-area of software engineering or any other community of interest.