Abstract
People work in software development projects to bundle the human resources and use the systematic approach to share system development knowledge. One can view knowledge as personalized related to facts, procedures, concepts, interpretations, ideas, and judgments. This way, knowledge is the outcome of the cognitive processing of information. Knowledge can be transferred from a source to a receiver. The collaborative knowledge-sharing mechanism is known as knowledge management (KM) in the software industry. The software developers can communicate with, learn from, and solve problems with other participating team members. The organizational culture is an essential factor in knowledge management success since it influences how team members learn and share knowledge. This chapter presents a case study that aimed to compare, in practice, the relationship between the KM cycle (SECI – socialization, externalization, combination, and internalization model) and the organizational culture through the competing values framework (CVF).
TopIntroduction
Software system development has transitioned from a mainly individual activity of designing standalone software systems to a predominantly distributed and collaborative approach that depends on or contributes to large and complicated software ecosystems (Pal, 2020) (Pal, 2019). Many software project members now contribute to multiple projects. Due to this work practice, project boundaries blur, not just in terms of their work and how they design and develop software but also their communication channels and knowledge management practice. This way, software designers want to collaborate with, learn from and co-design with other designers, creating a participatory culture within distributed software development activities. Many software designers care to bother about the programming they need to develop and the skills they gain, and their knowledge and intimacy with other participating team members. These work practices, in turn, demand more collaborative software design and development activities (Pal, & Karakostas, 2020).
Encouraging distributed and collaborative software system analysis and design requires appropriate communication mechanisms. Communication is a method of imparting or exchanging information by writing, speaking, combining, or other ways. Communication-related research issues have attracted tremendous interest from ancient time, and it has evolved considerably. One of the prominent human discourse scholars, Corax, suggested the need for “speakers to produce an effect in listeners” (Hinks, 1940) (Kennedy, 1959). Such a requirement serves through the ancient time in the views of familiar rhetoricians, logicians, philosophers, and academic books put forward a pivotal question: how does one individual communicate effectively? In answering this question, subsequent academics and practitioners add, amend, or critique the research work of predecessors. Modern researchers are also expressing their views with the traditional approaches to business communication effectiveness. For example, Monge (1973) calls for a “dynamic” way to assess the effectiveness and suggests that theory construction for communication in the future should focus on a new set of variables and employ a new set of analytic techniques.
This way, supporting software professionals' collaboration and communication requires new generation tools (e.g., web-based applications, telephone, email, WhatsApp, and Zoom video conferencing system) are used. A simple diagrammatic representation of some of the communication channels is shown in Figure 1. The richness and ability of these tools are enhancing today's global software development practice. Software professionals need to learn new skills to use these tools. Besides, these communication tools allow creativity in work practice, promote engagement, and help software development participation. This engagement is also demanded cultural issues of the global software development team.
Figure 1. Some of the communication channels in global software development
Understanding global software development team-based culture is fundamental to realizing what goes on in software development teams, running them, and improving them (Schein, 1992). Team-based software development culture is defined as the shared assumptions, beliefs, and expected behaviours (norms) present in a global team. Most organization development scholars and observers recognize that organizational culture has a powerful effect on organizations' performance and long-term effectiveness. Cameron and Quinn (1999) present that what differentiates successful teams from others is their organizational culture.
Within this new dimension of software development practice, software creation combines externalized knowledge (e.g., document exchange, programming instruction, technical guidelines to tackle software design) and the tacit knowledge that resides in group-members heads (e.g., operational practices, design constraints). In real-world communication and software development, dedicated tools (e.g., Computer-Aided Software Engineering (CASE)) help developers to create and share (i.e., externalize) tacit knowledge in a highly collaborative environment.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Software Project Management: A software project is the complete software development procedure from user requirement collecting to development, testing and maintenance, carried out according to the execution methodologies, in a specified period to achieve the intended software product.
Software Process Development: Software design is a process to translate user requirements (or needs) into some appropriate form, which helps the programmer in software coding and implementation.
Competing Values Framework: The competing value framework (CVF) has been recognized as one of the most important models to deal with factors that make organizations effective. The model has been applied to a variety of topics related to individual and organizational behaviour. Researchers are using this empirical technique to help thousands of organizations and tens of thousands of managers improve their performance.
Agile Software Development: An evolutionary and iterative approach to software development with focuses on adaption to changes.
Organizational Culture: Organizational culture can be considered as the norms that characterize a workgroup or organization. It is also suggested that the cultures of productive and economically successful organizations are often characterized by the norms of (i) collaboration, (ii) innovation, and (iii) integrity / ethical behaviour. These norms characterize successful organizational cultures, in part, by fostering greater trust and commitment among team members or employees.
Knowledge Management: Knowledge management is emerging as a critical management responsibility, and consequently, organizations are investing a vast number of resources to support the acquisition, storage, sharing, and retrieval of knowledge in software development projects.
Software Engineering: Software engineering is the systematic application of the engineering approach to software system development.