Toward Improvement-Oriented Reuse of Experience in Engineering Design Processes

Engineering design processes are hard to support. The creativity, complexity and unpredictability characterizing them complicate the identification and formalization of their fine-grained process knowledge. Process support should therefore alleviate this shortcoming by eliciting new engineering ways of working and improving the existing ones based on substantial experiences captured during process execution. This paper discusses a process improvement approach pointing toward this direction. An adapted experience factory infrastructure, by continuously monitoring the process execution, infers new ways of working using a case-based approach and provides improvement support on both a project and a corporate basis. The presented solution integrates ideas from case-based reasoning, requirements engineering and software engineering.