Lessons learned from 25 years of process improvement the rise and fall of the NASA software engineering laboratory

• Published in: Proceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering pp. 69 - 79
• Main Authors: Basili, Victor R., McGarry, Frank E., Pajerski, Rose, Zelkowitz, Marvin V.
• Format: Conference Proceeding Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY, USA ACM 01.01.2002; IEEE
• Series: ACM Conferences
• Subjects: Applied sciences; Computer science; Computer science; control theory; systems; Educational institutions; Exact sciences and technology; History; Laboratories; NASA; Permission; Personnel; Programming; Social and professional topics > Professional topics > Management of computing and information systems > Project and people management; Social and professional topics > Professional topics > Management of computing and information systems > Software management; Software; Software and its engineering > Software creation and management; Software and its engineering > Software creation and management > Software development process management; Software engineering; Software measurement; Software development; NASA; Process improvement; Data gathering; Software engineering
• ISBN: 158113472X; 9781581134728
• ISSN: 0270-5257
• DOI: 10.1145/581339.581351

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.