Knowledge management in small software development organisations: A South African perspective

Abstract

Background: Software organisations have been experiencing software development failures since the beginning of software development. Globally, latest Standish Group CHAOS reports indicate that only 29% of projects are successful. In South Africa (SA), the ITWeb report (2013) indicates that only 11% of all projects are successful. Intervention strategies such as software process improvement (SPI) frameworks and new software development methodologies such as agile methods have been introduced to address this issue. These intervention strategies do not seem to be effective because software development projects continue to fail. To address this issue, software organisations are turning to knowledge management (KM). This is because software development is a knowledge-intensive task.Objectives: The study aimed to investigate KM practices in small, medium and micro (SMMEs) software development organisations in SA and to determine if KM has benefited the organisations.Method: Fifteen software development project managers from 15 software development SMMEs were interviewed. Content analysis was used to analyse the data.Results: The study found six KM practices in the organisations: knowledge acquisition, creation, storage, sharing, organisation and application. The study found that KM has benefited organisations by making them effective, efficient and productive.Conclusions: The study concluded that software development organisation have adopted KM, although informally, and that KM practices have improved organisational routines and processes.

Knowledge activities applied | towards a holistic knowledge management approach in the software industry

“…Sungkur and Ramasawmy (2014) refer to such activities as building blocks for knowledge management processes to which technical tools are linked in order to show which aspects of knowledge management they support. In their survey on knowledge management in software engineering, Vasanthapriyan et al (2015) go through the software development life cycle and analyse its stages for their relation to the teams' knowledge, while employees from small South African software companies comment on their experience regarding KAs in Shongwe (2017). Examples for such mappings, while not actually focused on, can be found in some other works, such as Sandhawalia and Dalcher (2010) and Abdur et al (2015).…”

“…It is a common understanding that software engineering and development is a highly knowledge-intensive discipline, and various aspects of it have attracted the interest of researchers in knowledge management (Rus and Lindvall, 2002; Kavitha and Irfan, 2011; Vasanthapriyan et al , 2015; Shongwe, 2017). In terms of the taxonomy proposed by Earl (2001), knowledge management strategies are usually closely related to the technocratic schools for traditional software development and more to the behavioural schools for agile approaches (Bjørnson and Dingsøyr, 2008).…”

“…These findings are confirmed by an investigation in large French companies conducted by Khalil and Khalil (2019) who conclude that agile practices contribute to the creation of a knowledge-intensive culture. Agile methodologies’ focus on team dynamics and information flow are beneficial for competitiveness more or less come automatically in small- or medium-sized enterprises (SMEs; Basri and O’Connor, 2011; Shongwe, 2017; Heavin and Adam, 2014). But also larger organisations can benefit from it since agile teams are usually kept small on purpose, e.g.…”

Root Cause Analysis in Post Project Phases as Application of Knowledge Management

“…Explicitly so at the 5th level. Correct use of knowledge management plays an important role in the improvement [11][12][13]. The issue of analysing the causal link of cause-effect needs to be mastered in particular [14].…”

“…Pareto Chart of non-implementation of post project phases (Source: processed by the authors).With the acceptance of the Pareto principle (80/20), the analysis shows that approximately 80% of all reasons for failure to implement post project phases are the following 12 reasons: Reason No. 7,13,12,8,3,11,14,20,4, 6,5,19 (for verbal cause description see…”