Knowledge management in practice: The case of agile software development

Knowledge is considered as the main competitive asset of the organization. One of the knowledge management (KM) cornerstones is improving productivity by effective knowledge sharing and transfer. However, from the game theory perspective, the main constraint is that people tend not to collaborate in uncertainty conditions, when collaborative behavior is not guaranteed, and sharing knowledge is time- and effort-consuming. Therefore, KM must be a practical aspect of the general organizational culture. Specifically, software development is a knowledge-intensive activity and its success depends heavily on the developers´ knowledge and experience. In this presentation we highlight how the agile approach initiates a culture change that is in line with the culture change needed for a KM initiative. We discuss KM enablers that are embedded in the agile software engineering approach, and illustrate how collaborating processes and knowledge transparency can weaken the dilemmas people face and lead to better knowledge extraction and sharing.