Light-Weight Experience Collection in Distributed Software Engineering

Nowadays, distributed software development has become more common. In a distributed project setting, managing experience is even more crucial than in a co-located project. Problems like ineffective communication, lack of awareness and trust and restrictive information flow policies impede experience exchange and raise the overall effort for software engineers to collaborate. Moreover, sharing experiences is usually not part of the development process and considered additional effort. This often leads to failure of the experience management initiative due to a lack of participation. This thesis proposes a framework for qualitative and quantitative assessment of light-weight experience collection. Light-weight methods primarily aim at lowering the perceived effort and return a reasonable benefit to the experience bearers. This thesis proposes characterizing criteria of light-weight experience collection and a measurement system to measure gradations of expected effort and benefit of an experience collection method. To support knowledge managers in choosing the appropriate collection method, this thesis provides a catalogue of strategies from different categories and areas of application in distributed development projects.