Lessons Learned about Structuring and Describing Experience for Three Experience Bases

The Experience Factory approach defines a framework for experience management. It has been successfully applied to software development at NASA for more than 25 years and has now been applied to other organizations outside the software development community. The Experience Management System (EMS) developed at Fraunhofer Center Maryland (FC-MD) is a set of tools implemented to support the Experience Factory approach. The Visual Query Interface (VQI), a component of EMS, is used in conjunction with a methodology to help organizations capture, synthesize and reuse experience. To easily add new experience as well as find previous experience packages, the captured experience must be structured and stored in an experience base. This paper describes how we organize and structure experience into packages that can be stored in the experience base. We describe some of the lessons learned from applying EMS to three different organizations.