Workshop Agile Knowledge Sharing for Distributed Software Teams

The nature of software engineering projects is rather complex. They involve people with different backgrounds, working in different phases and activities. Software engineering is a field where constant technology change takes place, rendering the work of involved people highly dynamic, in the sense that discovering solutions for new problems belongs to the daily tasks. Knowledge in software engineering is diverse and its proportions are immense and continuously expanding. Important needs that drive the use of knowledge management are capturing and sharing process and product knowledge, acquiring knowledge about the application domain and new technologies, as well as knowing who knows what. In order to address these issues, software engineering practitioners have adopted various forms of organizational practices, collaboration technologies and knowledge management systems such as lessons learned databases. However, it turns out that those often centrally organized and heavyweight solutions are difficult to apply and maintain in distributed development settings with frequently changing collaborators from different organizations [RM06]. Accordingly, such dynamic distributed development settings – a