The software engineering laboratory - an operational software experience factory

For 15 years, the Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL) has been carrying out studies and experiments for the purpose of understand- ing, assessing, and improving software and software processes within a production software development environment at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration/Goddard Space Flight Center (NASA/GSFC). The SEL comprises three major organizations: NASA/GSFC, Flight Dynamics Division University of Maryland, Department of Computer Science Computer Sciences Corporation, Flight Dynamics Technology Group - These organizations have jointly carried out several hundred software studies, producing hundreds of reports, papers, and documents, all of which de scribe some aspect of the software engineering technology that has been analyzed in the flight dynamics environment at NASA. The studies range from small, controlled experiments (such as analyzing the effectiveness of code readingversus that of functional testing) tolarge, multiple- project studies (such as assessing the impacts of Ada on a production environment). The organization's driving goal is to improve the software process continually, so that sustained improvement may be observed in the resulting products. This paper discusses the SEL as a functioning example of an operational software experience factory and summarizes the characteristics of and major lessons learned from 15 years of SEL operations.