Managing software engineers and their knowledge

This chapter begins by reviewing the history of software engineering as a profession, especially the so-called software crisis and responses to it, to help focus on what it is that software engineers do. This leads into a discussion of the areas in software engineering that are problematic as a basis for considering knowledge management issues. Some of the previous work on knowledge management in software engineering is then examined, much of it not actually going under a knowledge management title, but rather “learning” or “expertise”. The chapter goes on to consider the potential for knowledge management in software engineering and the different types of knowledge management solutions and strategies that might be adopted, and it touches on the crucial importance of cultural issues. It concludes with a list of challenges that knowledge management in software engineering needs to address

A review of research methods in end user development

This article gives a structured overview of the field of End User Development, and its related fields of End User Programming, End User Software Engineering and meta-design. We have analyzed 93 papers from these fields that have been published between 2004 and 2013 in major and relevant journals and conference proceedings. The article discusses the methods, purpose and impact of the research that was analyzed, and points towards trends within the research community, as well as research gaps that need to be addressed

Method Diffusion as a Social Movement

This paper describes an investigation into the diffusion of information systems development methods (ISDMs). We portray method diffusion as an instance of technological diffusion. Technological diffusion is normally portrayed within the IS industry as an overtly rational process. In this paper, we postulate that the external diffusion process of ISDMs has many features in common with broader social movements and test a model of knowledge-based diffusion. We use the case of the recent history of the dynamic systems development method (DSDM), a public domain standard methodology for rapid application development (RAD), to illustrate some of the key features of method diffusion processes within a UK context