Implementing knowledge management in any organization is a challenge because of the time and effort that is required before it starts to return on the investment. Software organizations seem to have even less time than others because of the fast pace of the business. The lack of time is a direct threat against knowledge management. People often have no time to even search for knowledge. This cultural behavior has the effect that a long-term investment such as knowledge management and learning for the next project are not prioritized. Instead, project managers are interested in finishing the current project on time. As long as management does not allow the culture to change and does not allow employees to invest in managing their knowledge, knowledge management is likely not to happen.
Another challenge is the elusiveness of software. Unlike products of other domains, software is not visible (compare with buildings in the civil engineering domain). Invisibility leads to less reuse of the system. A developer, while implementing or modifying a system, cannot find out if the work has already been done. Many times, developers reinvent a system instead of reusing it, and this results in lower productivity. Another result is that software developers are not accustomed to reuse, which is a problem because the idea behind knowledge management is reuse of assets.
The most problematic challenge to knowledge management is that most of the knowledge in software engineering is tacit and will never become explicit. It will remain tacit because there is no time to make it explicit. There are very few approaches and tools for turning tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge, and most of the tacit knowledge is tacit in the most extreme way. Therefore, it is difficult to express and make explicit. A way to address this problem can be to develop a knowledge sharing culture, as well as technology support for knowledge management, never forgetting that the main asset of the organization is its employees.
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