Experience Factory-based professional education and training

Professional education and training plays a crucial role for successful transfer of innovative software engineering technologies and for achieving long-term strategic goals of an organization. We describe how empirically validated knowledge related to methods, tools, and techniques is organized and maintained in an organizational unit called Experience Factory. Emphasis of the paper is to describe how the knowledge and experience available from the Experience Factory is integrated into professional education and training courses and programs. We apply the fundamental quality improvement paradigm to describe the different steps how to perform courses and programs as part of organizational learning. Finally, the approach is illustrated by technology related experiences from the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering. The infrastructure technology under investigation is goal-oriented measurement following the GQM paradigm. We describe the relevant part of a technology package, which forms the background of our related professional education and training courses.