KNOWledge engINeering in Global software development (KNOWING)

23 August 2010 - Princeton, USA

This workshop is co-located with ICGSE 2010 in Princeton, USA, 23-26 August 2010. For more information, visit www.icgse.org. It follows on from the successful KnowING workshop co-located at last year's ICGSE 2009 conference held at University of Limerick, Ireland.

Description

Knowledge engineering is an evolutionary process of engineering artefacts and using them to gain new understandings. These new understandings are then used to further engineer or modify artefacts and the process continues. Knowledge engineering in global software development is being increasingly researched by the software and the knowledge management communities. To implement a good knowledge engineering strategy in a global software development environment, organisations have to overcome issues which have been identified in many previous studies. These issues make global software distribution a difficult and complex task.The effective and explicit engineering of knowledge had been presented as a key factor in the survival of companies in current business environments.
The software development business is no different.

Some of these issues include such factors as the problem of understanding requirements, testing of systems, co-ordination of software development projects, cultural and language differences, lack of communication, geographical and temporal distance from team members and the customer, different process maturity levels, development and testing tools, standards, technical ability and experience.

A major problem which has emerged in this area is that too often the implementation of an outsourcing or offshoring strategy has been seen as simply the replication of those strategies which are implemented for co-located software development. This short sighted approach has led to serious problems and numerous failures. It is in this context that we are interested in how knowledge engineering strategies have been and can be successfully implemented in the global software development environment.

To continue to gain benefit from the Global Sofware Development environment, engineering knowledge effectively and explicitly must become a central factor.

This workshop aims to explore the following questions:

• Is it good enough that knowledge engineering in the global software development environment should arise indirectly?
• If knowledge and its effective and explicit engineering is a key to survival in dynamic and unpredictable environments, how can global software engineers and managers afford to ignore it, or at best manage it tacitly as a by-product of some other activity?
• How can tacit knowledge be recognised within the global software engineering environment?
• Can organisations involved in global software engineering make this knowledge explicit? Have they been doing so and for how long?

One major goal of the KNOWING workshop is to define a research agenda and establish a community around the topics of knowledge engineering, knowledge management, and knowledge sharing in global software development. Ultimately,we would like to develop a reference framework for knowledge engineering in overcoming the global software development challenges, in particular, how to relate social/economical aspects(e.g., cultural differences, geographic dispersion, time-zone difference, loss of communication richness, loss of teamness, co-ordination breakdown) with technological/software engineering aspects(e.g., product architecture, development methods/tools, collaborating technology, managerial technologies, communication infrastructure, team building).