Abstract

INTRODUCTION Reuse of products, processes and experience originating from the system life cycle is seen today as a feasible solution to the problem of developing higher quality systems at a lower cost. In fact, quality improvement is very often achieved by reusing and modifying over and over the same elements, learning about them by direct experience. This article presents an infrastructure, called the experience factory, aimed at capitalization and reuse of life cycle experience and products. The experience factory is a logical and physical organization, and its activities are independent from the ones of the development organization. The activities of the development organization and of the experience factory can be outlined in the following way: • The development organization, whose mission is to develop and deliver systems, provides the experience factory with product development and environment characteristics, data, and a diversity of models (resources, quality, product, process) currently used by the projects in order to deliver their capabilities. • The experience factory, through processing this information and other state-ofthe-practice notions, will return direct feedback to each project activity, together with goals and models tailored from previous project increments. It will also