The impact of educational background on design knowledge sharing during pair programming: An empirical study

The management of knowledge in software processes is becoming a challenging concern for researchers and practitioners. Explicit knowledge can be formalized in many kinds of documents and rules, and consequently transferred in a number of manners. On the contrary, tacit knowledge cannot be formalized, because it is mainly retained in personal cognitive models and consists of individual capabilities of dealing with problems. The design of software systems requires a consistent deployment of tacit knowledge, and pair programming has shown great promises for helping to share knowledge between programmers. It is a common experience that programmers come not only from computer science and engineering curricula, but also from other education degrees, such as mathematics, natural sciences, and social sciences. In this case they attend proper specialist post graduation courses. We have executed an experiment in order to verify the relationship between educational background of pair's components and knowledge sharing throughout working in pairs while designing software systems. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005