Building an Experience Base for Software Engineering: A report on the first CeBASE eWorkshop

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.We want to thank Barry Boehm, Scott Henninger, Rayford Vaughn, Winsor Brown, Dan Port and Michael Frey as well as all participants for their contribution to the success of the eWorkshop. We also want to thank students at USC and UMD for their contribution in testing the system and Jennifer Dix for proof reading this paper.