Improving Knowledge Sharing in Distributed Software Development

Abstract

Distributed Software Development has become an established software development paradigm that provides several advantages but it presents significant challenges to share and understand the knowledge required for developing software. Organizations are expected to implement appropriate practices to address knowledge management. From the existing studies, it is been analyzed that there were problems of collaboration between distributed team members which effects knowledge sharing. Documentation problem (such as missing, poor and outdated documents) and knowledge vaporization (as much of the conversation and communication is done via chat and retrieving it later is a great headache) is a major challenge in Distributed Software Development in knowledge sharing. Our main objective is to improve knowledge sharing between distributed team members and prevent knowledge vaporization and reduced documentation problem that will help in improving software development process in a distributed environment. To eliminate these challenges we proposed a framework which deals with documentation and knowledge vaporization problems and evaluated it through industrial case study and evaluate the framework performance in real-life context where actually the problem arises, we conducted the interviews and analyzed the data using thematic analysis and SUS questioner we came to the conclusion on team members response that they are satisfied with our proposed solution and it improved their knowledge sharing process. Our intention was to improve the knowledge process with our proposed solution and the evaluation showed that we resolved these problems.