Towards Better Knowledge Management in Global Software Engineering

Many organizations employ distributed teams for development of enterprise information systems. The trend of distributed teams or Global Software Engineering (GSE) has been on the rise for the last decade or so. Improved resource allocation, cost savings and learning of best practices are some of the benefits that cause this increase. When dealing with distributed teams these organizations face several project management challenges such as communication and coordination issues, cultural differences, knowledge management. Lack of knowledge sharing is one of the most critical issue that needs to be addressed. It is difficult to ensure availability of right knowledge at the right time to the right person. The knowledge needs to be shared across the organization but limitations of knowledge sharing tools or dispersed knowledge sharing media makes it more challenging to share knowledge. In addition, lack of tool support for knowledge sharing further aggravates the problem. This paper presents a unified knowledge sharing framework to facilitate knowledge management in global software engineering environment. The framework aims to mitigate the shortcomings of knowledge sharing tools and dispersed availability of knowledge sharing media by providing communication, collaboration, organizational memory and project management aspects on one platform. The proposed framework is based on the existing knowledge sharing frameworks and will be validated using the criteria formulated on the set of activities which are required or beneficial for knowledge sharing.