ReBEC: A Method for Capturing Experience during Software Development Projects

Abstract

In software organizations, usual ways to capture the experience project team members acquire are based on methods such as project postmortem analysis, post-project revisions and others alike. Their main drawback is that the experience capture is done (if ever) after project completion, which leads to the risk of losing it if, as usually occurs, team members are finally not available. This paper introduces ReBEC (Reflection Based Experience Capture), an approach that enables organizations to integrate the experience capture activities into daily software project tasks. We also present the case study of the implementation of this approach in a software organization. The study results show that ReBEC allows an earlier capture of knowledge and experience compared to existing approaches, and identify sources of knowledge as well as lessons learned and proposals of best practices.