A case study of wiki-based experience repository at a medium-sized software company

Abstract

The paper reports on an exploratory case study where an organizational learning methodology was used to support knowledge sharing in a medium-sized distributed software development company. The method is based not only on a codification approach but also on a personalization strategy. To facilitate its use in a dynamic environment with minimal overhead, our MASE system utilizes both informal and formal knowledge representation mechanisms. The results provide evidences for the need of knowledge sharing tools (1) to incorporate not only codification-oriented repository technologies but also those that facilitate communication and collaboration among people, and (2) to support not only structured but also unstructured knowledge representation mechanism. It reveals that an informal knowledge authoring tool such as the Wiki-based MASE is used for sharing content for problem understanding, instrumental, projective, social, expertise location, and content navigation purposes. We also observe self-organized maintenance of the repository content among the ordinary repository users as a result of the open-edit nature of MASE.

Experience Management for Very Small Entities: Improving the Copy-Paste Model

“…We agree with [13] that small and medium-sized software organizations (SMEs) need a more lightweight means of creating these knowledge bases with minimal overhead. Wiki-based repositories are often used as knowledge repositories, because the wiki concept easily integrates users into the knowledge-sharing process in SMEs [14].…”

A Spatial Hypertext Wiki for Architectural Knowledge Management

“…On the other hand, Wikis can be easily used. For example, Chau and Maurer report the experience of using a Wiki in a software engineering company where all the different actors in the company were able to share knowledge, and that the content was organized and managed by the collective efforts of the users [29]. This is due to the fact that Wikis have an open nature, which avoids the hierarchical barriers in an organization, as well as the set of action permissions encountered in other knowledge management tools.…”

An Infrastructure for Indexing and Organizing Best Practices

“…Analyses of such repositories have produced valuable insights into how private experience repositories work within an organization [5,7,12]. However, the scale of such analyses can be limited due to commercial sensitivity.…”

“…However, the need for understanding informal and unstructured repositories has been well-recognized [5,7]. Our approach addresses this problem.…”