From Software Documents to Experience Knowledge Based Artifacts

Acquisition, preservation, exploitation, and management of knowledge assets of an organization have become prominent tasks in order to make the software development more efficient. Documentation written during a development lifecycle can include more information than just project schedules, distinct requirements of software products or descriptions of product quality. Decisions, design rationales and other problem solving experiences are also implicitly documented to some extent in the documentation. This paper represents an approach for identifying this tacit knowledge and documenting it as experience knowledge based artifacts. We focus on knowledge that essentially originates from individual developers, and their individual human experiences. Documentation related to software inspections have been used as an example in our studies, but the approach can be generalized to all software development documentation. The findings presented in this paper are based on observations in two research projects in case companies.