Vol.10 (2020) No. 3 ISSN: 2088-5334 The Development and Evaluation of Experience-Based Factory Model for Software Development Process Mastura Hanafiah a,1 , Rusli Abdullah a,2 , Masrah Azrifah Azmi Murad a,3 , Jamilah Din a,4 a Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, Universiti Putra Malaysia, 43400 Malaysia E-mail: 1 mastura.hanafiah@daimler.com; 2 rusli@upm.edu.my; 3 masrah@upm.edu.my; 4 jamilahd@upm.edu.my Abstract— Knowledge, and experiences in software development have been accumulated over time throughout the project lifecycle. Previous studies have shown that the management of knowledge and experiences in software development has always been an issue. Therefore, the knowledge transfer and information flow are inefficient, misinterpretation, and inconsistencies always occur between individuals or teams, and the organization fails to learn from past projects. It is understood that efficient knowledge and experience management for software development organizations is crucial for the purpose of sharing and future reuse. This paper discusses the prototype development for a proposed model, which is based on the experience factory approach, to manage knowledge and experiences for the software development process. Discussions include the system functionalities and design, infrastructure requirements, and implementation approach. The efficiency and effectiveness of the prototype are evaluated as survey research based on Jennex & Olfman knowledge management success model. Rasch analysis is used for data reliability and validity. Results show positive feedback on the model’s efficiency and effectiveness. Additionally, as agreed by most respondents, the top three of the model contributions are: to encourage learning organization, to prevent knowledge loss and to aid in decision making. Keywords—experience factory; knowledge management; software development process; prototype evaluation. I. INTRODUCTION In software development (SD), there are many stages of events and activities take place typically; some of them are iterative in nature. Throughout the development lifecycle, a lot of methods, techniques, and tools are used. The knowledge and experiences gained during development have become important assets in software organizations. In the previous work, via a systematic literature review [1], it has been identified that there are issues in knowledge management for SD, and it is even more challenging for distributed teams. The main challenges identified are inefficient knowledge transfer and information flow [2], [3], misinterpretation, and inconsistencies [4], [5], and additionally, organizations fail to learn [6]. Due to the importance of knowledge retention and reuse, it is therefore essential to facilitate knowledge management for software process improvements in software organization [2], [7]. Knowledge management (KM) for software development has emerged since the late 1990s, and enormous studies have emerged since then. The interactions between tacit and explicit knowledge allow the conversion of data and information to become useful knowledge and experiences that can be used as a future reference [8]. In general, organizational KM has continuously strived for process improvement. Experience Factory (EF) is a software process improvement framework based on reuse of products, processes, and experiences originating from the system lifecycle [9]. EF focuses on two distinctive organization (Fig. 1): Fig. 1 The Experience Factory [9] Project Organization provides the experience factory with project data, processes, and models used in the development, and uses packaged experience to deliver software products; 1016