Práticas de gestão do conhecimento no apoio ao processo de especificação de requisitos de software

Abstract

The main objective of this research is to identify key practices of knowledge management that contribute to retain the technical knowledge generated in the software requirements in custom-made for industrial environments. Despite the large number of research projects seeking to understand the organizational processes from the perspective of knowledge, there is a lack of empirical studies about the creation of knowledge in the software requirements. As a theoretical contribution, this research brings together approaches by major authors focusing on those processes, in a proposal that consolidates and structures concepts in three dimensions: sources of knowledge, creation of knowledge and practices of knowledge management identified in requirements elicitation, elicitation techniques and requirements specification. For the empirical part, an exploratory field research has been conducted with the use of questionnaires, interviews, and document analysis. The selection of companies was based on the analysis of the municipal record of service providers in this kind of business, micro and small companies acting in industrial environments. The sample consists of six companies of high value custom-made software, located in Vitória-ES, and, among these companies twenty-two respondents: six project managers and sixteen software engineers. The semistructured interviews were applied to project managers, while the close-question questionnaires were answered by developers. The results pointed to the interaction between the processes studied; the sources of knowledge most used in requirement specification; the elicitation techniques that most contribute to the creation of knowledge; and the practices that most concern, interact and integrate the software production. Among the practices that contribute most to retain knowledge in the specification of software requirements, we have: Best Practices, Knowledge Base, Documentation Norms and Standards, Organizational Memory, Organizational Learning, Narratives, Benchmarking, and Corporate Education. The companies surveyed have undertaken preliminary initiatives in knowledge management. Although these findings cannot be generalized to other companies, they may be compared with similar projects and may guide further research.