The competency refinery: An environment for process improvement through the accumulation of experiences

Accumulating and managing development experiences plays a key role in improving software quality and process. However, the complexity of the software process makes it difficult to establish and effectively provide operational support for experience management. To overcome these difficulties, this thesis defines a concept named the Competency Refinery, along with a method for building and running one to support software process improvement. The Competency Refinery concept provides an organizational approach for extracting development experiences from current software projects and supplying them to future projects. The thesis also provides a set of tools to support the accusation, selection, and evolution of software experiences within the Competency Refinery framework.; The concepts defined in this thesis, has been deploying to implement a Competency Refinery to support software development using application frameworks. Then, the concepts were validated by using the refinery, over two years, to support software development in 15 different software projects developed as a part of a senior level software engineering course at the Department of Computing Science, University of Alberta. Two experience-bases were developed and managed within the framework of this thesis. One to support peer reviews and the other to support development using a specific framework called the CSF. Through our experience with the competency refinery, a peer review process for information exchange was identified to support framework learning.