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Volume 5, Number 3 - Experienced Based Management
Funk and Wagnall's defines 'EXPERIENCE' as knowledge derived from ones own action, practice, perception, enjoyment or suffering; how superbly applicable to Software Engineering. The articles in this issue deal with perceptions gained through the actions and communications of the lessons learned from others as well as practice gained individually and in teams. Raw talent can take one far however, when tempered with wisdom, success is more likely. It is the experience of programming teams and their management that leads to success.
Vic Basili (UMD) and Barry Boehm (USC) have been instrumental in the design and implementation of "The Experience Factory." The Experience Factory defines a framework to plan the use of resources, manage and manipulate resources and processes and strives for continual improvement. Key to Experience is its capture, structure, searchability, availability and maintainability. The article by Basili and Boehm details a large program called CeBase and its immediate application which is the Lessons-Learned Repository for COTS software development.
In an article summarizing his keynote address at the 2002 Software Technology Conference (STC) in Salt Lake City, Lloyd K. Mosemann II (SAIC) gives us his perspective on the ills of Software Engineering, especially, 'best practices' and suggestions for healing them. Seldom have I been in such near congruent accord with an author. Bravo!!
John Salasin (DARPA) and his coauthors, Assad Moini (SPC) and Gwen Williams (Schafer Corp.) present Habitats, an Architecture for the Global Information Grid. "The Habitats concept and its supporting technology will enable a new generation of systems that can successfully and predictably operate in a network-centric world of vastly distributed and dispersed resources, devices and users interacting via the Global Information Grid."
In a previous article, Lawrence Bernstein (Stevens Institute of Technology) and his colleagues have introduced a software-engineering course whereby computer science students are exposed to real world problems. His students are given problems which failed in real life, and are expected to work through to a successful solution. A team approach is used. The value of management is clearly brought to bear. Now Mr. Bernstein exposes us to Software Rejuvenation, a fault tolerant process that has had much success.
In searching for experience based and apropos software engineering material, the following web sites contained a great deal of information. First, from the Software Program Managers Network second, from Software Methods and Tools and finally, from Brad Appleton. Especially useful are Brad's many Software Engineering links.
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