Knowledge Management Support for Distributed Agile Software Processes

Agile Software Development has put a new focus on the question of how to share knowledge among members of software development teams. In contrast to heavy-weight, document-centric approaches, agile approaches rely on face-to-face communication for knowledge transfer. Pure face-to-face communication is not feasible when applying agile processes in a virtual team setting. In this paper, we argue that the right approach for virtual software development teams using agile methods lies between a radical "none but source code" standpoint, and the multitude of documents proposed by heavy-weight development standards. This paper introduces work on developing a system for the task-based capture and pro-active distribution of recurrent information needs that typically arise for developers, as well as potential ways to satisfy these information needs. Our approach facilitates an incremental organizational learning process to capture and maintain knowledge on what documentation/information is actually needed, such that documentation is created on an "as needed" basis.