Learning Spaces: Automatic Context-Aware Enrichment of Software Engineering Experience.

Software engineering consists of human-based, knowledge-intensive activities in which new situations require new knowledge by the software engineers. Several explorative studies confirm that reuse-based approaches suffer from three problems in practice: bad understanding of reusable artifacts and experience packages in particular, no explicit support for the internalization of knowledge and no explicit connection between experience management and technology-enhanced learning approaches. The presented learning space approach automatically generates so-called context-aware learning spaces by merging information from an experience base with learning content. Specified variabilities in generic learning space artifacts support adaptation on the level of structure, content and presentation to context characteristics. A controlled experiment and a case study provide statistically significant results, which quantify the positive impact of learning spaces upon the understanding and application of experience packages, knowledge acquisition (i.e. learning), perceived information quality of experience packages, as well as the use, acceptance and software ergonomics of the developed tools.