9. Developing and Maintaining Experience Management Applications

Abstract

Today, there is already an increasing number of successful companies developing industrial experience management applications. In former days, these companies could develop their early pioneering applications in an ad-hoc manner. The highly-skilled expert of the company was able to manage these projects and to provide the developers with the required expertise. The experts did not have guidelines or methods which helped their developers implementing new projects and there was no way to preserve the experience made in previous projects for future use. This could cause serious problems when members of the staff left, taking their experience with them, and new staff had to be trained. The result was an inefficient and/or ineffiective system development. Nowadays, the situation has changed. The market for experience management applications increased significantly. Therefore, these companies have to face the fact that the market demands companies executing more and larger projects than in earlier days. It is required that they develop software fulfilling current quality standards. Consequently, contemporary IT companies can no longer sustain inefficient or ineffectual application development. What is required is a development and maintenance methodology for experience management applications. This methodology is located in the outer shell of the experience management model as introduced in Sect. 2.2.

This chapter presents the INRECA methodology targeted at industrial experience management applications. The methodology has been developed in the INRECA-II European ESPRIT project (1996-1999). Full details are discussed by Bergmann et al. (1997), Bergmann and Altho.( 1998), Bergmann et al. (1998), Bergmann and Göker (1999), Bergmann et al. (1999a) and on electronic media (Bergmann et al. 1999b; INRECA Consortium 1999).