Experience bases: what to do with the knowledge that walks in and out of R&D labs
Attany Nathaly Lima Araújo defended at FCTE/UnB an undergraduate thesis designing a process for building experience bases in R&D labs — a classic knowledge management challenge applied to software engineering.
Brasília, December 7, 2016
In every software organization, people come and go carrying with them tacit knowledge that is hard to reconstruct. In R&D labs, where staff turnover meets short projects, the effect becomes acute. This is the blind spot that Attany Nathaly Lima Araújo’s undergraduate thesis, defended in December 2016 at FCTE/UnB, attempts to address — advised by Prof. Sergio Antônio Andrade de Freitas and co-advised by Prof. Wander Cleber Maria Pereira da Silva.
The research revisits the Experience Factory idea — a knowledge management initiative that treats project lessons learned as an asset to be cultivated, not a byproduct that disappears with departing team members’ hard drives. The work translates that framework into the day-to-day of a lab: how to capture experience cheaply, how to catalogue it so future team members can find it, and how to ensure it actually gets used.
The theme speaks to soft skills and teamwork because, in the end, knowledge management is not a technology problem — it is a culture problem. Tools help, but the gestures of contributing, reviewing, and reusing experience are what sustain a living knowledge base.
The research also led to the paper Experience and Innovation Factory: Adaptation of an Experience Factory Model for a Research and Development Laboratory, published in 2017. The paper presents the adaptation of the Experience Factory model to a research and development laboratory context.
The full text — written in Portuguese — is available at the UnB Undergraduate Theses Digital Library.
About CEDIS: The Center for Studies, Development, and Innovation in Software (CEDIS), linked to the University of Brasília, researches and develops innovative software solutions.