Process of building an experience database for R&D laboratories

Abstract

Employees are the main assets of software organizations and the software industry is characterized by frequent technological changes, which entail a continuous flow of new knowledge. Due to the volume of knowledge, software organizations have problems in identifying the content, location and use of knowledge, that is, difficulty in managing this knowledge. The Experiment Factory can be considered to represent the knowledge management initiative. A basic step inside the Experiment Factory is the experience base. The purpose of this work is the abstraction of the process of building a experience base for R & D laboratories, inserted in the context of Software Engineering teaching of a Brazilian public university, and that do not have a defined knowledge management process. To do this, was executed a case study in two R & D laboratories - ITRAC (Information Technology and Research Center) and LFS (Software Factory Laboratory), idealized from the need to create an environment that proposes to students, Experiences related to the development of software, processes and methodologies in this area. The implementation of the experience bases for R & D laboratories could be realized based on a process of structuring the base of experiments, within an Experiment Factory model that has been adapted to the context of R & D laboratories. The process adopted fulfills the objective of the work, since through it, was possible to build a base of experiences to maintain the knowledge generated by the objects of study. With this, the OwnCloud tool has become the experience base of the ITRAC and LFS R & D laboratories.