The Experimental Software Engineering Group (ESEG) of the University of Maryland views the study of software engineering as a laboratory science. Specific research projects are centered around formalizing various aspects of (a) the Quality Improvement Paradigm (QIP), (b) the Experience Factory (EF), and (c) the Goal/Question/Metric approach (GQM). The QIP is aimed at building descriptive models of software processes, products, and other forms of experience, experimenting with and analyzing these models, in order to build improvement-oriented, packaged, prescriptive models. The EF is an organizational approach for packaging reusable software experiences and supplying them to projects and building core competencies in software.
