The Empirical Investigation of a Wiki based group system in organizations.

In this paper, success factors for wiki based information systems in organizations are discussed. Based on information system success factors which have been discussed in previous research, this study will present the conceptual framework of how to predict knowledge work intention on using a wiki based information system and what the wiki based information system’s success factors are by studying relationships between user satisfactions and IS service quality. In addition, the role of managerial support for increasing a user’s adoption of a wiki-based information system will be discussed, based on a user’s behavioral intention to use the wiki

The Role of Inspirational Leadership and Technology Support for Contextualization on Psychological Contract in Distributed Teams

This study investigates how inspirational leadership and technology support for contextualization influence individuals’ psychological contract and knowledge sharing in distributed teams. Drawing on the intersection between social identity, psychological contract and leadership theories, the current research highlights the importance of inspirational leaders who foster two kinds of psychological contract obligations, namely commitment and reciprocity. The results show a significant impact of inspirational leaders on psychological contract obligations. The impact of inspirational leadership on obligations of reciprocity is strengthened when there is technology support for contextualization. Our findings suggest that psychological contract obligations can motivate employees to engage in knowledge sharing. This provides interesting implications for theory and practice in distributed teams

An Ethnographic Study of Collaboration in a Game Development Team

This paper presents an ethnographically-informed study of the practices at a game company that develops serious games for business training. Games research focuses mainly on the game product, paying little attention to the design and development process. This study attempts to address this gap. We examined the day-to-day activity of a team responsible for designing and developing game content. Our data collection methods were informed by ethnography; they include field observations, contextual interviews and audio recordings. A thematic analysis was performed on transcripts of naturally occurring conversation within the team. The results were triangulated with field notes and interview data. The result is a description of collaborative activity within a game development team, and an interpretation of how the socio-technical environment supported the game development process. This study suggests innovative game design can be supported by creating a culture of collaboration, but innovation from teams is largely dependent on the quality of the interpersonal relationships

A Model for Capturing and Managing Software Engineering Knowledge and Experience

During software development projects there is always a particular working "product" that is generated but rarely managed: the knowledge and experience that team members acquire. This knowledge and experience, if conveniently managed, can be reused in future software projects and be the basis for process improvement initiatives. In this paper we present a model for managing the knowledge and experience team members acquire during software development projects in a non-disruptive way, by integrating its management into daily project activities. The purpose of the model is to identify and capture this knowledge and experience in order to derive lessons learned and proposals for best practices that enable an organization to preserve them for future use, and support software process improvement activities. The main contribution of the model is that it enables an organization to consider knowledge and experience management activities as an integral part of its software projects, instead of being considered, as it was until now, as a follow-up activity that is (infrequently) carried out after the end of the projects

Developing a Software Tool to Enhance the Creativity during Software Development Using the Results from the Literature Review

Success during software development depends on the creativity of software engineers. Knowledge plays a very important role in enhancing the creativity of software developers. Knowledge is available in different forms like repository knowledge (experiences of past projects) and community knowledge (gained through communication among software engineers). I have developed a tool which could help software engineers be more creative and successful. In order to develop this tool, a systematic literature review was undertaken to find how knowledge influences creativity and the key features required in the tool. The systematic literature review reports the various knowledge sources and how these can be accessed by developers to be more creative, and the methods used to access the knowledge sources. This paper describes the motivation for the tool, features of the tool and improvements for the next version of the tool

A Social Network to Increase Collaboration and Coordination in Distributed Teams

Trust is one of the key factors involved in determining the success or failure of any project. However, achieving and maintaining trust in distributed projects when team members are geographically, temporally and culturally distant from each other is a considerable challenge. In this paper, we present Trusty, a tool designed to help develop trust in Virtual Teams. The tool is explained by using a schema of trustworthiness, and an indication of how the tool supports some features of these schema in order to foster the development of trust is therefore provided. Users have also evaluated the tool, and the results of this evaluation are presented here

HARVESTING SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE:SOCIAL NETWORKS AND KNOWLEDGE IN TECHNOLOGY-MEDIATED TEAMS

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Knowledge management in agile software development : techniques and factors that promote knowledge creation

Orientador: Ivan Luiz Marques RicarteDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Engenharia Elétrica e de ComputaçãoResumo: O processo de desenvolvimento de software pode ser considerado um processo intensivo de criação de conhecimento. Os membros de equipes ágeis de desenvolvimento de software são trabalhadores que compartilham intensivamente seus conhecimentos tácitos e explícitos para a construção de software inovadores. Esse conhecimento, inicialmente distribuído nas mentes dos programadores, deve ser gerenciado por meio de técnicas e ferramentas que apoiem a aprendizagem organizacional, a criação, a construção e a avaliação de software. Nesse sentido, este trabalho objetivou identificar e compreender as técnicas utilizadas pelas equipes ágeis e os fatores capacitadores que auxiliem a criação de conhecimento em equipes de desenvolvimento de software. Para atingir aos propósitos desta pesquisa, primeiro, foi feita uma revisão de literatura, que seguiu os princípios de revisões sistemáticas, para compreender o Estado da Arte e identificar técnicas das metodologias ágeis e fatores que promovem a criação de conhecimento no desenvolvimento ágil de software. Segundo, para o percurso metodológico dois estudos de caso foram conduzidos por meio de entrevistas e analisados qualitativamente por meio da Teoria Fundamentada em Dados. Como resultados, dois fenômenos centrais emergiram dos dados analisados. O Fenômeno 1 mostra que as equipes ágeis estabelecem técnicas que apoiam a aprendizagem organizacional, a criação e a construção de software. O Fenômeno 2 indica que as equipes ágeis promovem fatores capacitadores que alinham a cultura organizacional e as características pessoais dos colaboradores e essas equipes são gerenciadas mediante uma inteligência coletivaAbstract: The software development process can be considered as an intensive process of knowledge creation. The members of agile software development teams are workers that intensively share their tacit and explicit knowledge to build innovative software. This knowledge, initially distributed in programmer¿s minds, should be managed by means of techniques and tools that support the organizational learning, the creation, the construction and the evaluation of software. Therefore, this study aimed to identify and understand the techniques and the enabling factors that support the creation of knowledge. To achieve the purposes, first, a literature review was made, which followed the principles of systematic reviews, not only to understand the state of the art but also to identify techniques and factors of the agile methodologies that promote the creation of knowledge. Second, two case studies were conducted as a methodology research through interviews whose data was qualitatively analyzed using the Grounded Theory. As results, two main phenomena emerged from the data analyzed. The first phenomenon shows that agile teams establish techniques that support the organizational learning, the creation and the construction of software. The second phenomenon indicates that teams promote enabling factors that align organizational culture and the employees¿ personal characteristics and the team is managed by a collective intelligenceMestradoEngenharia de ComputaçãoMestre em Engenharia ElétricaCAPE

Combining SOA and BPM Technologies for Cross-System Process Automation

This paper summarizes the results of an industry case study that introduced a cross-system business process automation solution based on a combination of SOA and BPM standard technologies (i.e., BPMN, BPEL, WSDL). Besides discussing major weaknesses of the existing, custom-built, solution and comparing them against experiences with the developed prototype, the paper presents a course of action for transforming the current solution into the proposed solution. This includes a general approach, consisting of four distinct steps, as well as specific action items that are to be performed for every step. The discussion also covers language and tool support and challenges arising from the transformation

La gestion de la connaissance des équipes de développement logiciel

RÉSUMÉ Contexte : Le développement logiciel est un travail d’équipe manipulant un produit essentiellement invisible. En conséquent, le développement logiciel nécessite des échanges de connaissances importants entre développeurs afin que l’équipe effectue une résolution de problème adéquate. Cette résolution de problème résulte en une prise de décision qui aura un impact direct sur la qualité du produit logiciel final. Objectif : Ce travail doctoral a pour objectif de mieux comprendre ces interactions entre développeurs et comment ces interactions peuvent être liées à des problèmes de qualité logicielle. Cette meilleure compréhension du phénomène permet d’améliorer les approches actuelles de développement logiciel afin d’assurer une meilleure qualité du produit final. Méthodologie : Premièrement, des revues de littérature ont été effectuées afin de mieux comprendre l’état actuel de la recherche en gestion de connaissance dans le génie logiciel. Deuxièmement, des analyses de code source et des discussions avec les développeurs ont été faites afin de mieux cerner les causes de problèmes classiques de qualité logicielle. Finalement, des observations faites dans l’industrie ont permis de comprendre la prise de décision collective, et comment cette prise de décision impacte la qualité logicielle. Résultats : Les observations effectuées ont démontré que la qualité logicielle n’est pas qu’un problème d’éducation ; l’essentiel des problèmes de qualité ont été introduits par les développeurs en toute connaissance de cause afin de répondre à d’autres impératifs plus urgents au moment de la prise de décision. Améliorer la qualité des logiciels demande de revoir la manière dont les projets de développement logiciel sont gérés afin d’assurer que les décisions prises sur le terrain n’auront pas de conséquences négatives trop coûteuses à long terme. Conclusions : Il est recommandé que les organisations se dote d’un nouveau palier décisionnel faisant la jointure entre besoins techniques (i.e. qualité logicielle) et administratifs (i.e. ressources disponibles). Ce nouveau palier décisionnel se situerait au niveau de la base de code (« codebase »), soit entre le palier organisationnel et le palier de gestion de projet. Une base de code étant modifiée de manière concurrente par plusieurs projets en parallèle, il devient nécessaire d’avoir un meilleur contrôle sur les modifications effectuées sur celle-ci. Ce nouveau palier serait le gardien des connaissances en lien avec la base de code, selon le principe « you build it, you run it » favorisé dans certaines organisations. Ce nouveau palier serait responsable d’assurer que la base de code reste d’une qualité suffisamment bonne pour supporter les activités de l’organisation dans l’avenir.----------ABSTRACT Context: Software development is a process requiring teamwork on an essentially invisible product. Therefore, software development requires important knowledge exchanges between developers in order to ensure a proper problem resolution. This problem resolution affects the decision making process, which will have a direct impact on the software quality of the final product. Objective: This thesis work aims to better understand these interactions between developers and how they can be linked to software quality problems. With a better understanding of the relation, it will be possible to improve the current software development management practices in order to ensure a better quality of the final software product. Method: First, literature reviews were made with the objective to understand the current state of the research in knowledge management in software engineering. Second, source code analyzes and discussions with the developers were executed in order to better understand the causes of typical software quality issues. Finally, observations were made in an industrial context in order to observe collective decision making in the field, and to understand how these decisions impacts software quality. Results: The bservations made demonstrated that software quality is not only an educational problem; most of the quality problems found were introduced voluntarily by the developers in order to answer a more urgent requirement at the time. Improving software quality therefore requires a review of how software development projects are managed in order to ensure that the decision made in the field do not have overly costly consequences in the long term. Conclusions: It is recommended that organization assign a new decision level linking the technical requirements (i.e. software quality) with administrative requirements (i.e. available resources). This new decision level would be situated at the codebase level, between the organizational strategy level and the project management level. A codebase being modified concurrently by multiple projects, it is therefore necessary to have a better control of the modifications made on it. The people at this new decision level would be the knowledge repository related to the codebase, under the “you build it, you run it” principle popular in some organizations. This new decision level would be responsible of ensuring that the codebase remains of a sufficient quality in order to support the future activities of the organization