Understanding and supporting knowledge flows in a community of software developers

Abstract

Knowledge sharing is a collective process where the people involved collaborate with others in order to learn from them. This effort creates communities where each member cooperates by sharing knowledge about a common domain. An example of these kinds of communities is software maintenance groups, where their members must collaborate with others, and share their knowledge and experience in order to complete their assignments. This paper presents a study carried out in two software maintenance groups to understand how the knowledge flows through these groups, that is, how their members share their knowledge when they perform their activities. The approach used to model the flows of knowledge and to identify the problems that affect that flow are described, as well as the main problems detected, and how we are trying to solve them with an agent-based knowledge management system. © Springer-Verlag 2004.