Knowledge Sharing in Software Development

In software development, a huge amount of knowledge needs to be shared between architects and developers, developers and testers, configuration managers and integration testers, and so on. Since all these people want to develop, test, architect software, and are reluctant to document it, a lot of this knowledge remains tacit. This is the more so in agile environments, where there is an inherent tension between top-down development guidance through specifications and other means, and a bottom-up development and delivery of new features. In multi-site development, such may easily lead to mutual misunderstandings, an increase in errors and problem reports, and wasting resources on rework. I will report on knowledge sharing challenges we encountered in industry, in particular in a large multi-site development organization that develops software for the printing industry.