Detecting and managing knowledge risk in software development processes

Abstract

Software engineering is a knowledge-intensive activity. In the case of software organisations, the most valuable assets are no longer buildings and machines but the knowledge held by their employees. Software engineers are not merely vessels of technical knowledge but are fully fledged knowledge workers. They are expected to form a deep enough understanding of whatever domain they happen to be working in such that they are able to apply their technical knowledge to build solutions which solve problems in the domain. In an industry with high staff turnover rates, this can be worrying. Organisations need to ensure that as employees flow in and out of the their employ, the intellectual capital they create and work with is somehow retained and leveraged to increase their competitive edge. Studies have shown that projects do not tend to fail because of developers' lack of technical knowledge, but rather for reasons such as requirements failures, communication failures and estimation failures. These failures can be traced back to inadequate knowledge management practices as a root cause. Software development processes tend to address knowledge management issues by prescribing documentation, a strategy known to knowledge management practitioners as codification. However, codification is but one of the techniques in the knowledge worker's arsenal. This work seeks to make a contribution to software engineering by carrying out research into the fields of software development processes and knowledge management with the goal of designing and evaluating a new software development life cycle that makes knowledge management an integral part of software development. Although work has been done to evaluate the effects of various knowledge management initiatives (e.g. introducing wikis or mentoring programmes) on software development, the concept of a development process built around knowledge management has not been found in the literature. Such a life cycle should not only aim to produce a quality product within reasonable timeframes, but also seek to achieve a healthy organisational knowledge landscape. The approach being proposed here involves the design and evaluation of a software development life cycle which is based on a knowledge management strategy that is tailored to software engineering. The strategy in question is biased towards personalisation and makes use of techniques from the engineering and cartographic schools of thought in knowledge management. The overarching goal is to make knowledge management part of the focus of employees' day to day job such that they can identify and expose knowledge assets, and expose and monitor knowledge risks so as to allow mitigating action to be taken when necessary.