Knowledge Management in Globally Distributed Agile Projects -- Lesson Learned

Knowledge management (KM) is essential for success in any software project, but especially in global software development where team members are separated by time and space. Software organizations are managing knowledge in various ways to increase transparency and improve software team performance. One way to classify these strategies is proposed by Earl who defined seven knowledge management schools. The objective of this research is to study knowledge creation and sharing practices in a number of distributed agile projects, map these practices to the knowledge management strategies and determine which strategies are most common, which are applied only locally and which are applied globally. This is done by conducting a series of semi-structured qualitative interviews over a period of time span during May, 2012-June, 2013. Our results suggest that knowledge sharing across remote locations in distributed agile projects heavily relies on knowledge codification, i.e. Technocratic KM strategies, even when the same knowledge is shared tacitly within the same location, i.e. Through behavioral KM strategies.

I. Introduction

Knowledge management (KM) is an essential area in software project management, since software development is a very knowledge-intensive job. KM is also often considered a software process improvement initiative [1], [2]. One of the biggest challenges in software organizations is to ensure availability of the right knowledge at the right time due to know ledge fragmentation, overload and de-contextualization [3]. Agile software projects address these challenges by emphasizing social interaction and conversations [4]. Knowledge is managed primarily through socialization strategies [5]. While face-to-face interaction facilitates effective knowledge sharing between team members, this is difficult to achieve in distributed projects, in which team members are dispersed across multiple locations and hardly ever meet in person. Distributed development is often associated with rigorous standatization and thus knowledge management strategies used are primarily characterized by knowledge codification or externalization [5].