MIT Sloan Management Review

Management of Technology and Innovation

Improve Software Quality by Reusing Knowledge and Experience

By Victor R. Basili and Gianluigi Caldiera

October 15, 1995

THE APPROACHES FOR IMPROVING QUALITY IN MANUFACTURING PROCESSES DON’T WORK ESPECIALLY WELL FOR SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT. THE AUTHORS provide a quality improvement paradigm for the software industry that builds on manufacturing models but focuses on reused learning and experience by establishing “experience factories.” Their iterative process enables an organization to acquire core competencies to support its strategic capabilities.

The quality movement that has had such a dramatic impact on all industrial sectors has finally reached the systems and software industry. Although some of the concepts of quality management originally developed for other products can be applied to software, as a product that is developed and not produced, it requires a special approach. In this paper, we introduce a quality paradigm specifically tailored to the systems and software industry. We discuss the reuse of knowledge, products, and experience as a feasible solution to the problem of developing higher-quality systems at a lower cost. In other words, how can an organization build models or package them so that it can reuse them in other projects?

Companies often achieve quality improvement by defining and developing an appropriate set of strategic capabilities and supporting core competencies. We propose a quality improvement paradigm (QIP) for developing core competencies. This process must be supported by a goal-oriented approach to measurement and control, and an organizational infrastructure that we call an experience factory.

In this paper, we introduce the major concepts of our proposed approach, discuss their relationship with other approaches in the industry, and present an example of an organization that successfully applied those concepts.

Why Is Software Development Different?

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