About Us

Who are we?

Founded in 1998, FC-MD is a not-for-profit applied research and technology transfer organization and is affiliated with the University of Maryland (UM) and our sister institute, the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering (IESE) in Kaiserslautern, Germany. Our offices are located adjacent to the University of Maryland campus in College Park, Maryland.

What we have to offer you…help with the hard part of software development.

Along with the perpetual challenge of acquiring new business and keeping customers satisfied, businesses and organizations face a constant need to decrease development time and cost. Atop these pressures is the expectation that product quality must improve, too. On a daily basis, software organizations must constantly assess the trade-offs inherent in achieving these goals. What would help?

- Better processes to estimate the amount of work required would allow better allocation of resources and increase on-time deliveries.

- Tools and data to manage projects would allow for better project control and decrease the risk of costly overruns.

- Reusing previous efforts and avoiding mistakes would reduce the amount of rework required.

- Knowledge gained from previous projects would help to reproduce successes and diminish the repetition of mistakes in future projects.

- Early defect detection processes would identify mistakes that develop into costly problems.

- Development teams taking full advantage of existing experience, quality approaches, and project management techniques would help avoid making repetitive errors.

- Efficient leveraging of valuable individual experience acquired with each project would create a valuable systematic knowledge and experience base.

We have created a unique model for helping you better Fraunhofer understand and manage your software business called the Experience Factory™ (EF). Our services are also based on our Quality Improvement Paradigm™ (QIP) and Goal Question Metrics™ (GQM) method emphasizing a focus on goal-oriented measurement and the importance of software to the organization.

We offer customized process solutions to evaluate development practices. We identify and recommend process improvements, provide training and direct support of your short- and long-term objectives. The scientists and specialists at FC-MD can design and deploy:

Fraunhofer Center – Maryland

the leading competence

center for applied research

and technology transfer in

experimental software

engineering.

FC-MD supports research

and development in the

field of software engineering

and its enabling technology.

We collaborate with private-

sector companies,

government agencies, and

academic institutions to

develop innovative,

actionable approaches to

address their software

issues.