Generalizing by similarity: Lessons learnt from industrial case studies

Large IT vendors execute thousands of projects in a variety of business domains and environments. Over the years, they end up repeatedly developing and deploying systems for a given domain in the same country, sometimes even for the same company. It would save them a lot of cost and effort if they could reliably depend on their past experience and draw insights from lessons learnt in the past. However, this requires them to generalize from past projects to a similar current project. In this paper we draw lessons learnt from three industrial case studies on how to generalize by similarity.