Knowledge from Document Annotations as By-Product in Distributed Software Engineering

Knowledge management can play a major role in the success of a distributed software engineering project promising huge increases in efficiency and effectivity. However, it often suffers from a lack of participation. Major problems are that sharing knowledge is time consuming and bears additional effort for the knowledge worker. In the course of development projects, software engineers create, read and annotate (particularly during reviews) a lot of documents. These annotations can contain valuable knowledge which should be made persistent and sharable with project partners. To lower the sharing effort for project participants, we present a light-weight approach to collect annotations as byproduct from project (-related) documents. The annotations are extracted from documents and interlinked with other experience and knowledge artifacts in a shared Wiki-based experience infrastructure for global software engineering. As immediate benefit for knowledge workers, making annotations and context searchable saves information retrieval time. In the long term, annotations combined with other experiences are engineered into reusable recommendations. In a preliminary evaluation in the software engineering research field and industry confirmed that our annotation sharing concept was perceived as helpful and time saving.