Managing embedded software project team knowledge

In modern large new product development (NPD) organisations the embedded software teams do not work in isolation but develop software in complex interrelationships with the other teams of the product development. Specifically the software team must interface with the system and hardware developments. Ambitious industrial product development programs require typically concurrent engineering of the various components of the system product, making it even more complicated for the software development to capture all the relevant information on time. Furthermore, multiple software projects may be working concurrently on different release versions of the same product family and platform core assets. In such a cross-functional environment, building and managing the embedded software team body of knowledge is not trivial. The paper proposes methods for managing such knowledge with a systematic modelling approach. The methods help in capturing project-specific context-driven key information. The empirical background of the study is in certain business units of Nokia Networks developing embedded software for telecommunications equipment products.