Diagnóstico de gestão do conhecimento em empresas de desenvolvimento de software

Abstract

Context: Managing knowledge is one of the main challenges for software development organizations. Thus, the principles of Knowledge Management (KM) are presented as determinant and effective factors for the software product quality. There are several approaches to applying KM in an organization. However, for a KM initiative to succeed, it is important to consider the KM current state that already exists in the organization. Objective: The objective of this work is to evaluate KM activities in software development organizations based on the application of a KM diagnosis process. Method: First, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) was conducted in order to summarize the main approaches to diagnose KM in software development organizations. Once the SLR was conducted, a KM diagnosis process was applied in thirteen software development companies to evaluate the KM activities in the organization as well as identify the performance of such activities. Results: Although in the software engineering context, the practice of KM diagnoses still does not seem to be well established, it was possible to identify different approaches to diagnose KM in the organization. Among the activities diagnosed in the companies, the activity of using knowledge obtained greater performance in the analyzes, the positions with greater emphasis on project management and the more experienced employees contribute more to the KM activities, and the projects that develop the systems from of some formal developmental approach (process models or agile methods) also tend to perform better in KM. Conclusion: With the results achieved in this project, it is hoped that software organizations can focus their efforts on incorporating KM practices and activities into areas that really need improvement or are more cost-effective in terms of KM.