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8-2
PROFES USER’S MANUAL
Experience Factory Concept
The background theory for the organizational infrastructure of PROFES is
the Experience Factory, which defines an organizational concept for
providing development projects with process and quality models. However,
it focuses mainly on measurement projects.
This user manual is not limited to measurement, but expands the
experience factory concept to include improvement programmes supported by the PROFES improvement methodology.
Basili et al. (1994) write: “The Experience factory is a logical and/or
physical organization that supports project developments by analysing and
synthesizing all kinds of experience, acting as a repository for such
experience, and supplying that experience to various projects on demand”.
It packages experience by building informal or formal models and
measures various software processes, products, and other forms of
knowledge through people, documents, and automated support. The
experience factory is illustrated in Figure 8.1.
The following roles are involved:
•
Corporate management
•
GQM definition team
•
GQM analysis team
•
Project team
Corporate management provides a project team with project objectives for
software development, and a GQM Definition team with business goals.
These business goals provide the long-term improvement targets to which
the GQM team should work towards. The GQM Definition team translates
these goals into measurement goals, and refines these measurement
goals into metrics and measurement procedures, based on environmental
characteristics provided by the project team and previous experience
packaged in the experience base. The project team provides the GQM
Analysis team with measurement data. The GQM Analysis team
processes this data and presents the results to corporate management
and the project team.