Acquiring and sharing tacit knowledge in software development teams: An empirical study

Abstract

Context: Sharing expert knowledge is a key process in developing software products. Since expert knowledge is mostly tacit, the acquisition and sharing of tacit knowledge along with the development of a transactive memory system (TMS) are significant factors in effective software teams. Objective: We seek to enhance our understanding human factors in the software development process and provide support for the agile approach, particularly in its advocacy of social interaction, by answering two questions: How do software development teams acquire and share tacit knowledge? What roles do tacit knowledge and transactive memory play in successful team performance? Method: A theoretical model describing the process for acquiring and sharing tacit knowledge and development of a TMS through social interaction is presented and a second predictive model addresses the two research questions above. The elements of the predictive model and other demographic variables were incorporated into a larger online survey for software development teams, completed by 46 software SMEs, consisting of 181 individual team members. Results: Our results show that team tacit knowledge is acquired and shared directly through good quality social interactions and through the development of a TMS with quality of social interaction playing a greater role than transactive memory. Both TMS and team tacit knowledge predict effectiveness but not efficiency in software teams. Conclusion: It is concluded that TMS and team tacit knowledge can differentiate between low-and high-performing teams in terms of effectiveness, where more effective teams have a competitive advantage in developing new products and bringing them to market. As face-to-face social interaction is key, collocated, functionally rich, domain expert teams are advocated rather than distributed teams, though arguably the team manager may be in a separate geographic location provided that there is frequent communication and effective use of issue tracking tools as in agile teams.

Evaluating VSEs Viewpoint and Sentiment Towards the ISO/IEC 29110 Standard: A Two Country Grounded Theory Study

“…There are multiple approaches to organizing the software development process and multiple factors influencing the software development process [3], with two major ones being the traditional (or plan based), which rely primarily on managing explicit knowledge, and agile methods, which primarily rely on managing tacit knowledge and recognizes the importance of human interaction in the software process [4,5]. Due to the rich variety of software development settings (for example: the nature of the application being developed, team size, requirements volatility), the implementation of a set of practices for software development may be quite different from one setting to another [6].…”

Islamic Work Ethics And Tacit Knowledge Sharing: Autonomous Motivation As Mediator

“…One of the important reasons for failure is highlighted by Massingham (2014), who pointed out that managing knowledge not only requires management, but it depends on individuals because it is human-based. In support of this argument, Ryan and O'Connor (2013) suggest that human factors should be further researched in understanding tacit knowledge sharing.…”

“…However, managing tacit knowledge is not an easy task and many initiatives fail because they neglect human factors such as ethical (Lee, 2011;Lin, 2007) and individual factors in understanding tacit knowledge sharing (TKS) (Ryan & O'Connor, 2013). However, Kim (2001:1043) argue that employee's sharing behaviour is 'not natural', hence it needs to be motivated (Hislop, 2003).…”

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“…These studies have all been conducted to explore specific aspects of software process such as process formation (Coleman et al 2008b), attitudes to adoption of software standards , software process knowledge management (Ryan et al, 2013), software team dynamics (Basri et al, 2011) software productivity (Yilmaz and O'Connor, 2012a), and personality types (Yilmaz and O'Connor, 2012b). Despite the varying specific emphasis in these studies, in all instances the participants were asked key foundational questions on the formation and evolution of software process within their organization and their attitudes, beliefs and opinion on both software process in general, process models and SPI activities.…”