Despite the enormous achievements in the field of Software Engineering (SE), in which software engineers had come up with methods, techniques, models, and tools to mitigate software crisis, yet many software projects fail to meet customers’ needs with respect to delivered products, to meet schedule, and cost above budget. Thus, this paper designed a framework for the application of Knowledge Management (KM) such that knowledge of SE practitioners could be preserved and reused. An Experience Repository (ER) was designed and implemented. The design employed architectural and conceptual representation of ER for SE. ER explored Knowledge codification and Document Management techniques for knowledge acquisition. It also provided a motivational method for reinforcing KM culture among SE practitioners through the platform of a dashboard which provides a rating mechanism in order to encourage practitioners to make use of the system. The system provided a platform for retrieval and reuse of software developers’ experience and projects’ processes, artifacts and documentation. The application of the KM initiative such as the ER in this work serves as a tool to mitigate software crisis in software development projects as lessons from previous projects guide SE practitioners to avoid mistakes and to reuse knowledge from successful projects.
Keywords: Knowledge Management, Software Crisis, Software Engineering, Software Process Improvement (SPI). Experience Repository
