For 25 years the NASA/GSFC Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL) has been a major resource in software process improvement activities. But due to a changing climate at NASA, agency reorganization, and budget cuts, the SEL has lost much of its impact. In this paper we describe the history of the SEL and give some lessons learned on what we did right, what we did wrong, and what others can learn from our experiences. We briefly describe the research that was conducted by the SEL, describe how we evolved our understanding of software process improvement, and provide a set of lessons learned and hypotheses that should enable future groups to learn from and improve on our quarter century of experiences.

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Article Free Access Share on The software engineering laboratory: an operational software experience factory Authors: Victor Basili View Profile , Gianluigi Caldiera View Profile , Frank McGarry View Profile , Rose Pajerski View Profile , Gerald Page View Profile , Sharon Waligora View Profile Authors Info & Claims ICSE '92: Proceedings of the 14th international conference on Software engineeringJune 1992 Pages 370–381https://doi.org/10.1145/143062.143154Online:01 June 1992Publication History 50citation892DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations50Total Downloads892Last 12 Months30Last 6 weeks5 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

Many new software development practices, tools, and techniques have been introduced in recent years. Few, however, have been empirically evaluated. The objectives of this study were to measure technology use in a production environment, develop a statistical model for evaluating the effectiveness of technologies, and evaluate the effects of some specific technologies on productivity and reliability. A carefully matched sample of 22 projects from the Software Engineering Laboratory database was studied using an analysis-of-covariance procedure. Limited use of the technologies considered in the analysis produced approximately a 30 percent increase in software reliability. These technologies did not demonstrate any direct effect on development productivity.