pagesKnowledge is one of the most important assets of an organization that directly affects business success, and its importance increases for organizations that use knowledgeintensive processes such as the software development industry. In an industry in which technological developments are rapid, in order to keep up with the continuously increasing competition and to obtain competitive advantage the software organizations need to obtain the correct knowledge, use it efficiently and pass it to future projects evolving it accordingly. The major aim of this research is to propose a novel model, namely AiOLoS, for assessing the level of organizational learning and learning characteristics in software development organizations. The primary contributions of this two-legged AiOLoS model are the identification of the major process areas and the core processes that a learning software organization METU/II-TR-2012-02 iii follows during its organizational learning process and to provide the necessary measures and metrics and the corresponding definitions/interpretations for the assessment of the learning characteristics of the software development organization.The research is supported with a multiple case-study work conducted in software development teams in order to identify the mapping of the core processes and the applicability of the AiOLoS model to software development organizations, its utilization as a tool for assessing organizational learning and providing a basis for software process improvement.