New information is obtained by research and disseminated by papers in conferences and journals. The synthesis of knowledge depends upon social discourse among the experts in a given domain to discuss the impact of this new information. Meetings among such experts are, however, expensive and time consuming. In this paper we discuss the organization of CeBASE, a center whose goal is the collection and dissemination of empirically -based software engineering knowledge, and the concept of the online workshop or eWorkshop as a way to use the Internet to minimize the needs of face-to-face meetings. We discuss the design of our eWorkshop and give the results of one eWorkshop that discussed the impact of defect reduction strategies. 1 Building an Experience Base for Software Engineering Software development is a people- and knowledge-intensive activity; it is a rapidly changing field, and although it is slowly maturing, many activities are still ad hoc and depend upon personal experiences. In ...
Victor R. Basili