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This tacit knowledge is essential to achieve the
innovation stage so that the organization will gain
the competitive advantage.
Software engineers look for knowledge sources,
for example books, on-line resources, databases, to
develop a software process but, on many occasions,
this knowledge is the tacit knowledge of the
organizations (Assimakopoulos, 2006). The study
carried out by (Komi-Sirviö et al, 2002) revealed
that the knowledge is not easy to find and, when it is
discovered, it cannot be reused. The reasons are that
knowledge gathering is too informal and the
knowledge is not readily available to the
organizations. Consequently, it is necessary to
gather the know-how of the organizations in an
artefact to be retrieved and reused in subsequent
projects. We defined an artefact, called product
patterns (Amescua et al, 2006) (Medina-Dominguez,
2007), to gather the knowledge of the software
engineering experts to produce a software product.
In this paper we describe the collaborative
framework that supports software process
improvement based on process assets reuse. The
main capabilities of this framework are:
- to reuse and manage of process assets
- to improve the efficiency of use of the
processes
- to reduce costs in software process
improvement programs
- to work collaboratively in the phases of
software projects
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows:
section 2 compares the proposed framework with
similar ones in the market. Section 3 explains the
collaboration framework proposed for process assets
reuse in the project under development. And, finally,
in section 4 we present the conclusions and future
works.
2 RELATED WORKS
The purpose of this paper is to propose the most
accurate architecture for the collaborative
framework. So, the authors reviewed some tools
available in the market as well as some research
prototypes to find out the most critical gaps in the
software tools that software engineers use to manage
software process improvement programs and
projects execution.
We reviewed four software tools and three
research prototypes. The authors analysed, and
evaluated the selected tools based on sixteen features
rated: 0 (Not present), 1 (Partially present), 2
(Present). The features evaluated were inspired by
the work presented by (Dargan, 2001) and are
presented together with the results in
http://sel.inf.uc3m.es/projects/PIBOK-PB/
AnalysisRelatedWorks.pdf. In the reminder of this
section we describe the main results of the
evaluation.
2.1 Support Software Tools
The software tools analysed are presented, mainly
focusing on the following features: knowledge
management, know-how reuse, project management,
software process models deployment support,
collaborative development platform and knowledge
searching.
• CodeBeamer (Intland Software, 2007): is a
collaborative development platform based on
J2EE that offers application life cycle
management features for development teams. It
includes the following main capabilities:
knowledge management (through a mechanism
called wiki asset linking), project management
and information retrieval. This tool lacks
knowledge management formalism because
wikis are considered content management
systems (Cunningham, 2001) instead of a
formal knowledge management artefact. This
explains why knowledge reuse cannot not be
done automatically. Despite the fact that this
tool is intended to support software
development, it does not provide either a
mechanism to select a software process model
for the organization and project features or an
electronic process guide to perform project
activities.
• IRIS Process Author (Osellus, 2007): is a visual
process management system that enables
collaborative authoring and tailoring of process
assets. This tool focuses on process
management and, for project management,
offers the possibility of exporting process
content and configuration to third party tools
such as Microsoft Project. Although this
application also includes some knowledge
management features, it lacks knowledge reuse
for the organization and projects context and
constraints. For know-how representation it
uses templates and wikis instead of a formal
representation artefact such as patterns,
ontologies or a thesaurus. Another deficiency is
the lack of software process models
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