Agile Knowledge Sharing 

1 Introduction

Knowledge is awareness or understanding of something such as information or skills. Knowledge creates most of the value in today’s economy and the value of knowledge often increases when shared .Organisational knowledge sharing aims at transferring to the organisation the information, skills and experience a person or team has .This is essential for sustaining the development of quality in software intensive companies .For agile development companies, knowledge is the core resource that is transformed to products and services in the development process .Moreover, Biao-wen claims that the software industry requires more knowledge management than any other sector.

Agile methods focus heavily on the delivery of product and customer value. Moreover, an agile team focuses on applying knowledge instead of sharing it .Agile methods facilitate knowledge sharing in the team but offer limited support for knowledge sharing outside the team. Agile methods favour tacit knowledge shared informally using face-to-face communication (personalisation strategy) in contrast to traditional knowledge management practices .Although attention has been paid to inter-team knowledge sharing [27], and techniques for distributed agile teams have proved to be successful, the focus here is on knowledge sharing across the organisation and not just between teams. The lack of knowledge sharing practices beyond the team can hinder sharing and sustaining knowledge in agile organisations .

2 Related Work

Software engineering is a knowledge-intensive activity . Software development teams are made up of knowledgeable individuals who need to be able to use, share, and communicate their knowledge in ways that foster problem solving and creativity. Whereas traditional software project approaches rely heavily on documentation and role-based working as ways of capturing and managing knowledge, agile approaches focus more on informal communication mechanisms within cross-functional teams .

Agile approaches employ intensive team work, face-to-face knowledge sharing, and trust as vital elements of working practice .Research evidence shows that good team work is crucial for project success, with important facets including communication, coordination, balance of member contributions, mutual support, effort and cohesion.Studies of agile teams have found that agile practices improve both informal and formal communication, and facilitate team and organisational communication .

3. Method

The research goal for the study was to identify areas that require improvement in organisational knowledge sharing in an agile company and to provide a baseline for assessing the progress and effectiveness of future actions. The study was initiated by the company who approached the authors1 with a request to investigate their challenge. A survey2 was used to reach a wide audience, it was sent to company employees (not customers), and concentrated on knowledge sharing between three groups: team members, company colleagues, and customers. The research questions are as follows.

RQ 1

How is knowledge shared in the organisation?

RQ 2

What motivates knowledge sharing in the organisation?

RQ 3

Is there a relation between agility and ease of knowledge sharing?

RQ 4

Is there a relation between frequency of knowledge sharing activities and ease of knowledge sharing?

Collaborator Company

The company in which the survey was conducted is a large IT service provider that primarily develops software for UK customers but has staff distributed over three continents. The majority of their workforce is based in India, and are sent to work in development teams at customer sites on a temporary basis in several countries worldwide. Development teams are assigned to a specific customer account and thus have a strong customer focus in their job and day-to-day responsibilities; many teams are embedded in the customer organisation and hence distant from each other. While some cross-organisational knowledge sharing tools and practices have been put in place such as wikis, Yammer, and profession-specific groups for training, these are limited.