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Knowledge management in software engineering and software process improvement activities pose challenges as initiatives are deployed. Most existing approaches are either too expensive to deploy or do not take an organization's specific needs into consideration. There is thus a need for scalable improvement approaches that leverage knowledge already residing in the organizations. This paper presents tool support for an Experience Factory approach for disseminating and improving practices used in an organization. Experiences from using practices in development projects are captured in postmortems and provide iteratively improved decision support for identifying what practices work well and what needs improvement. An initial evaluation of using the tool for organizational improvement has been performed utilizing both academia and industry. The results from the evaluation indicate that organizational characteristics influence how practices and experiences can be used. Experiences collected in postmortems are estimated to have little effect on improvements to practices used throughout the organization. However, in organizations where different practices are used in different parts of the organization, making practices available together with experiences from use, as well as having context information, can influence decisions on what practices to use in projects.

Software process improvement (SPI) is challenging, particularly for small and medium sized enterprises. Most existing SPI frameworks are either too expensive to deploy, or do not take an organizations' specific needs into consideration. There is a need for light weight SPI frameworks that enable practitioners to base improvement efforts on the issues that are the most critical for the specific organization. This paper presents a step-by-step guide to process assessment and improvement planning using improvement framework utilizing light weight assessment and improvement planning (iFLAP), aimed at practitioners undertaking SPI initiatives. In addition to the guide itself the industrial application of iFLAP is shown through two industrial cases. iFLAP is a packaged improvement framework, containing both assessment and improvement planning capabilities, explicitly developed to be light weight in nature. Assessment is performed by eliciting improvements issues based on the organization's experience and knowledge. The findings are validated through triangulation utilizing multiple data sources. iFLAP actively involves practitioners in prioritizing improvement issues and identifying dependencies between them in order to package improvements, and thus establish a, for the organization, realistic improvement plan. The two cases of iFLAP application in industry are presented together with lessons learned in order to exemplify actual use of the framework as well as challenges encountered.

Knowledge management (KM) in software engineering and software process improvement (SPI) are challenging. Most existing KM and SPI frameworks are too expensive to deploy or do not take an organization's specific needs or knowledge into consideration. There is thus a need for scalable improvement approaches that leverage knowledge already residing in the organizations.This paper presents the Practice Selection Framework (PSF), an Experience Factory approach, enabling lightweight experience capture and use by utilizing postmortem reviews. Experiences gathered concern performance and applicability of practices used in the organization, gained from concluded projects. Project managers use these as decision support for selecting practices to use in future projects, enabling explicit knowledge transfer across projects and the development organization as a whole. Process managers use the experiences to determine if there is potential for improvement of practices used in the organization. This framework was developed and subsequently validated in industry to get feedback on usability and usefulness from practitioners. The validation consisted of tailoring and testing the framework using real data from the organization and comparing it to current practices used in the organization to ensure that the approach meets industry needs. The results from the validation are encouraging and the participants' assessment of PSF and particularly the tailoring developed was positive.

There is a lack of early project control when automotive software is developed by external suppliers. This paper proposes a process improvement that targets early deliverables from suppliers as a means to improve project control. An addition to the existing automotive process employing a two-level use case approach is presented. In an example study involving Volvo 3P we show that the process improvements are applicable in real industrial development processes and that use cases are suitable for automotive requirements communication. The example also showed that use cases can be employed at the level of detail necessary to describe embedded systems.