what-when-how
In Depth Tutorials and Information
turn, made turning a project over to someone else quite difficult, as following the
structure of the code in a monolithic system is very tedious. A change needed to
take place, and a change in the way of thinking was imminent if the software devel-
opment industry was going to grow at any sort of fast pace.
Much research has been conducted around the subject of knowledge manage-
ment. Knowledge management is known in the academic and engineering worlds as
the stable controlling of information, both written-down and inherent programmer
knowledge, that can be managed to provide programmers and programming teams
the ability to access tools and ideas that they might not have otherwise. he irst
thing that must be done to begin working toward managing knowledge is to realize
that a working environment, when dealing with software development, is not only
a technical idea. he thought process should be centered on a sociotechnical idea.
his is true whether the programming is part of collaborative software development
or a single programmer writing a program. his line of thought introduces the idea
that not only are programmers tied to their own hardware, software, and technol-
ogy, but they are also tied to their social connections that keep them “in the know.”
Technical and social interworking all contribute to the overall success of the soft-
ware development process, and knowing this is the first hurdle that must be jumped
past present ideals.
Much of the research pertaining to the papers in question deal with the fact
that there are many different types of resources that are available and used for pro-
grammers when they are working on a collaborative project of some sort in software
development. Programmers have access to their past experiences, their past work,
code that has been shared among many users and teams, and also other program-
mers themselves. To make any sort of collaboration of ideas work, an infrastructure
must be in place to standardize the interface. If there are too many ways to access
different information, then the workload to actually find the information is not
worth the information to start with. Protocols and working practices must be in
place to conform information and knowledge as described earlier to each other.
In most cases, the most productive types of assistance that programmers can
receive when needed is interpersonal communication. Whether it be through face-
to-face communication, electronic communication, or communication through
production documents and other artifacts, interpersonal communication gives
software teams and individual programmers alike access to codified information,
but also to inherent knowledge from the situational expert in question that could
not be obtained otherwise [1].
Face-to-face communication is among the most common types of information
low in the field of software design and development. Often, the communication
that takes place in a face-to-face manner is between colleagues on a certain project
or co-workers of a certain development group. Even throughout society, not confin-
ing oneself to the world of computer programming and software design, face-to-face
communication is the most effective tool for understanding one another. It is some-
times forgotten that there is more to interpersonal communication than just words.
