The Need for Capturing and Sharing Process and Product Knowledge

Each software product and process is different in terms of goals and contexts. A single software development approach cannot be assumed for all projects or products. To develop software for the space shuttle is not the same as to develop software for a dishwasher. Software developers are often exposed to this diversity, which makes the software discipline inherently experimental and we constantly gain experience with each development project. “Knowledge emerges in work practices, often being defined by the first project to address the issues involved”.

Ideally, we would apply that experience to future projects in order to avoid mistakes and leverage successes. This does not always happen because often these work practices are not captured. Development teams work on similar kinds of projects without realizing that results would have been achieved more easily if they followed a practice adopted by a previous project. The bottom line is that development teams do not benefit from existing experience. Instead they repeat mistakes over and over again. This was manifested by the fact that “a large number of cases showed a lack of knowledge in the specific project, while this knowledge was actually available in the company”. These problems are also tied to the problem of transferring knowledge to novices in the organization.

Knowledge Management addresses the issues of capturing and sharing knowledge, while the problems of project diversity and product singularity make it clear that such a system must be flexible enough to encompass variations on the same theme. Most artifacts guiding a software project and developed during a software project can be represented as documents. Therefore, these are the main explicit assets of the software organization. These assets directly support the core business and must be managed so that they do not get lost. The problem of transferring knowledge from experts to novices is facilitated if the knowledge is readily captured, stored, and organized, possibly as documents. Therefore, Document Management is the main corner stone of our knowledge management model.