Towards an Experience Management System at Fraunhofer Center for Experimental Software Engineering Maryland (FC-MD)

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Towards an Experience Management System at
Fraunhofer Center for Experimental Software
Engineering Maryland(FC-MD)
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Background

• Organizations must deliver products faster,
  cheaper, and with higher quality than before.
• To learn from experience an organization must
  document and share knowledge and experience to
• become less dependent on its employees
• Knowledge is often lost when employees leave the
  company
• unload its experts
• Sharing knowledge the traditional way is very
  time consuming
• get new employees to become productive sooner
• New employees need to learn from previous
  experience
• It takes a fairly long time to collect experience
  because its unstructured, undocumented, and even
  unavailable
• Why is it that so few organizations do this even
  though they know it is important?

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Background

• Experience needs to be
• Captured,
• Structured,
• Searchable,
• Made available, and
• Maintained.
• There needs to be
• An experience management framework with concepts
• Methodologies governing how the experience is
  structured
• Processes, procedures and roles governing how the
  experience is managed on a daily basis
• Supporting tools that helps with all of the above

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Fundamental concepts behind EMS

• Basilis Experience Factory (EF) defines a
  framework for Experience Management
• EF requires a separate support organization that
  works with the project organization to manage
  experience
• EF has been successfully applied to NASA for more
  than 25 years
• The Fraunhofer Center for Experiemental Software
  Engineering Maryland will use the EF and apply it
  to organizations helping them to manage their
  experience
• FC-Maryland has a series of Experience Management
  projects that develop processes, tools, and
  taxonomies to work with organizations to tailor
  and implement the experience factory concepts to
  their needs.
• Such an implementation is called an Experience
  Management System (EMS).

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The Experience Factory model of FC-MD
Experience Factory
Project organization
Analysis
Produced data
Doing
Synthesis
Execution Model
Experience Base
Planning
Packaged experience
Business Support
EMS support
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EMS is more than code

• The executable system is a client server design
• 13 components, written in Java, using an OO
  design
• Each component is owned by person responsible for
  implementing it on both the client and server
  side.
• EMS is part of knowledge management at
  FC-Maryland
• It is an implementation of a knowledge management
  system
• It is a process for business resource
  understanding and management
• It is corporate culture. To get full benefit from
  EMS, must change how organizations operate

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EMS at FC-MD

• Based on an initial EMS developed for Q-labs we
  are now tailoring it to needs at FC-MD
• We are populating the EMS with our own experience
• We are using our own methodologies to define
  processes, procedures and roles on how to manage
  the experience
• We are continuously adding features to and
  improving the user interface of the EMS tool
• We will further develop and evaluate EMS by
  letting our own employees use it on a daily basis

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Aspects of an EMS

• Content --- information, knowledge, and
  experience
• Structure --- the different ways we organize and
  view the content
• Procedures --- instructions on how to use,
  package, add, delete, integrate, and update
  experience
• Supporting tools --- tools that help us capture,
  structure, store, integrate, analyze, and
  retrieve experience
• The work of setting up an EMS for a customer is
  guided by a methodology

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EMS Basic Concepts

• Package Type defines a set of properties for a
  domain
• Example Documents Projects Employees, etc.
• Project package type components
• Attributes (scalar values) name project
  manager start date etc.
• Elements (documents) Project description
  Requirements Design Report
• Links (URLs) ResultedFromProject
  BasedOnProposal
• Sample Project package 241
• Example Attributes
• nameEMS project managerMikael
• Example Elements
• Project descriptionpis_ems.doc
  Requirementsreqs_ems.doc
• Example Links
• ResultedFromProjectpackage 169
  BasedOnProposalpackage 130

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Our Methodology for Developing an Experience Base
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The EMS Tool

• Is a search and retrieval tool for all kind of
  documented knowledge
• Procedure
• Formulate and submit query
• Investigate and interpret results
• Refine query if necessary
• Investigate each package on a more detailed level
• Follow links, examine and retrieve elements,
  review comments

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Tool Prototype EMS user interface