Utilization of knowledge management tools in software development

Software development is an expensive and time intensive endeavour. Projects ship late and buggy, despite developers´ best efforts, and what seem like simple projects become difficult and intractable [5]. Given the complex work involved, this should not be surprising. According to [10] in their research at Microsoft development centre, indicated that over half of developers´ time was spent interacting with co-workers. This is because, developers communicate to obtain knowledge. When developers acquired information, they deferred their search with the intent of resuming it, or even gave up with no intent of resuming it again. [5] states that in scheduling disasters, functional misfits and system bugs arise from a lack of ambient communication between different teams. Why do projects fail, take too long or end up with poorly developed product? Despite ambient communication, knowledge shared is often distorted, suppressed or misappropriated. According to [41] he argues that, the dark side of managed knowledge includes distortion, suppression and misappropriation knowledge. All three of this can happen during creation, storage and retrieval, distribution and presentation. It therefore goes without mentioning that some of the challenges that may go hand in with the establishment of the KM tools in software development companies include challenges such as, are developers willing to express their knowledge to other developers through a KM tool. And in mind that different developers having different experiences, leads us to another question whether developers are willing to leave their knowledge behind. This paper tries to answer some of these challenges and why KM tools play a better role in software development process.