Incorporating Design Knowledge into the Software Development Process using Normalized Systems Theory

The knowledge residing inside a firm is considered to be one of its most important internal assets in obtaining a sustainable competitive advantage. Also in software engineering, a substantial amount of technical know-how is required in order to successfully deploy the organizational adoption of a technology or application. In this paper, we show how knowledge on the development of evolvable software can be managed and incorporated into a knowledge base, to enable the more productive construction of evolvable systems. The Normalized Systems (NS) theory offers wellfounded knowledge on the development of highly evolvable software architectures. This knowledge is captured in the form of Normalized Systems elements, which can be regarded as design patterns. In this paper, it is discussed how Normalized Systems elements facilitate the management of state-of-theart knowledge in four processes: (1) knowledge creation, (2) knowledge storage/retrieval, (3) knowledge application, and (4) knowledge transfer. Based on this discussion, it is shown how lessons can be drawn from the NS approach for the management of software engineering knowledge. Keywords-Normalized Systems; Design Patterns; Knowledge Management.

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