Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
9.5.3 Importance and Adoption of Formal and Informal
Experience-Sharing Mechanisms
Even not all organizations had established mechanisms to reuse and promote ex-
perience and knowledge sharing, all respondents agreed on the importance of cap-
italizing on the knowledge inside the company. Our assessment and comparison of
the context of companies that had established knowledge management mechanisms
inside the company and those that do not, led us to suggest some factors that might
have positively influenced the adoption of these mechanisms: the stability of do-
mains approached by the companies that valued the reuse of knowledge; and the
need to ensure the maintainability of the resulting systems. In this context, our re-
sults show that continuous monitoring of the marketplace is becoming a usual prac-
tice among integrators to keep themselves updated about components, technologies
and trends (even before they have a specific need). Therefore, the search practice
is often becoming a continuous monitoring activity rather than being on a project
demand basis. The latter has research and practical implications. On one hand, it
implies a restructuring of the tasks and responsibilities of the software development
team. On the other hand, it has increased the need of enabling intra-organizational
channels of communication for interacting/informing results.
Furthermore, while most of current research usually assumes that component
providers' portals [
7
,
47
], repositories [
52
] and search engines [
13
] are the primary
ways in which integrators identify components and information about them; the re-
sults from our study show that integrators hardly agreed on the use of these resources
in practice. Instead, integrators that do not have established knowledge management
mechanisms inside the organization, deal with this task by using resources that pro-
moted experience and knowledge sharing on the Internet, for instance by domain-
specific websites that offer forums to interchange ideas and solutions to common
problems (e.g., TheServerSide or Experts Exchange). The direct interaction with
colleagues and professional networks (e.g., asking for comments about a component
from a colleague, or attending specialized trade shows, conferences or workshops)
gave valuable results as well.
To the best of our knowledge, the exploitation of this social interaction for sup-
porting the OSS component selection has not received great attention yet. There is
a demanding need to effectively deal with the inherent subjectivity of this kind of
information. Reputation mechanisms as used in other business domains as ebay.com
could be really valuable to deal with the subjectivity of diverse opinions.
9.6 Validity Threats
Like most studies in Software Engineering, our study faces some validity threats.
This section discusses these threats in terms of construct, internal, and external va-
lidity, as suggested by Robson [
45
] and Wohlin et al. [
53
]. It furthermore emphasizes
the corresponding strategies used to deal with these threats.
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