IMPROVING SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT IN SME

THROUGH KNOWLEDGE SHARING

A Practical Approach

Sanae Saadaoui and Frédéric Fleurial Monfils

Centre of Excellence in Information Technology and Communication - Charleroi, Belgium

Keywords: Knowledge Management, SME, Process Improvement, Experience Transfer, Knowledge Capitalization.

Abstract: To be competitive on a global market and especially in software development and software delivery, SME

(Small and Medium-sized Enterprise) should capitalize on their internal know-how. Knowledge

management should be present in any software process improvement in order to capitalize on past

experiences and existing good practices instead of introducing a completely new way of working.

Unfortunately, most knowledge management techniques are targeted towards big companies because they

require a large amount of resources both in time, money and people involved in the process. In this paper,

we present preliminary results of an experiment made with a set of SME developing and delivering software

products. In this experiment, we helped these companies improving the management of their knowledge by

providing them with lightweight knowledge management techniques, adapted to their size and their context.

1 INTRODUCTION

Knowledge management plays an important role in

software process improvement and help companies

to be more competitive. Capitalizing on experiences

is often mandatory for business growth and even for

business survival (Rasheed, 2005). Companies that

have managed their knowledge can afford the

retirement or the leaving of their skilled workers.

A company can choose between a number of

different approaches to capture its internal

knowledge (Handzic, 2006). One of these

approaches is the REX method – where REX stands

for “Return of Experience”. The objective of this

method is to create “knowledge elements” like

“experience elements” or “know how” issued from

an activity. These elements are designed and

recorded in knowledge repositories in order to be

reused within the company.

Other approaches are using discussion groups

and/or community of practices to encourage the

experience sharing among their employees.

Unfortunately, these approaches are seldom

adapted to the size and context of SME because they

often require a big investment in time, people and

money (Hermann and al, 2007). Also, the return on

investment is often poor: for example, in the long

run, experience repositories only contain few articles

and are no more maintained.

In this paper, we present first results on an

experiment conducted with a set of Small and

Medium sized Enterprises (SME) – enterprise from

1 to 50 employees – interested in improving their

software development practices and delivery

processes.

This paper is organised as follows: Section 2

describes the research method used for the

experimentation, Section 3 addresses the knowledge

sharing in software development, Section 4

describes the experiment in detail, Section 5

mentions related work, and finally, Section 6

concludes this paper with a list of future work.

2 ACTION RESEARCH

The research method that has been used is “action

research” (Davison and al, 2004). In this method,

researchers and practitioners work jointly on the

development and testing of innovation techniques in

a local context. The work is done in an iterative

process of learning where researchers and SME

partners collaborate. The objective of this

collaboration is to identify, understand and solve

their common problems. The iterative process

313

Saadaoui S. and Fleurial Monﬁls F. (2009).

IMPROVING SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT IN SME THROUGH KNOWLEDGE SHARING - A Practical Approach.

In Proceedings of the International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing, pages 313-317

 SciTePress

ensures the commitment of the actors as well as the

quality and relevance of the research.

In our experiment the following steps have been

planned:

1. A diagnosis of the current software

development practices and identification

of the issues that are surfaced due to lack

of Knowledge Management;

2. A planning of the needed actions is

elaborated (action planning) that takes

into account the context and the

motivation of SME;

3. An intervention (action taking) of the

researcher is made. In this case, we

propose to assist the companies in

applying techniques for knowledge

management that have been adapted to

their size and practice level;

4. An evaluation of the situation after the

intervention conducted with the

employees involved in the action-taking

phase;

5. A reflection on improvements that could

be applied on the implemented technique.

The goal of the collaboration with the companies

in the Action Research was to improve their current

practices in software development by capitalizing on

their past experiences. This experiment produced

interesting feedback on the implementation and the

adaptation of the described techniques in the context

of an SME.

3 KNOWLEDGE SHARING

IN SOFTWARE

DEVELOPMENT

In this experiment our assumption was that the

quality of the produced software (and consequently

the satisfaction of the customer) could be increased

by capitalizing on previous experiences of the

company. Many improvement techniques, such as

Total Quality Management (Boéri, 2000), rely on

analysing past experiences (Zaharan, 1997) to foster

improvement initiatives. SME involved in this

experiment listed the lack of communication and

knowledge sharing between team members as a root

cause of major issues during their software

development projects.

In order to capitalize on their know-how, the

company should regularly record and refine the

expertise accumulated on projects. Recording such

expertise is not an easy task for an SME, because in

a competitive market such as software development,

winning the next contract is often more important

than analysing what went wrong in the past projects

and how to avoid similar problems in future projects.

To record the expertises, two main strategies are

commonly used: the Codification strategy and the

Personalization strategy as described in (Henrie and

Hedgepeth, 2003) and (Bixies, 2002). The

Codification strategy is based on explicit knowledge

– knowledge that has been codified in a knowledge

repository. The Personalization strategy deals with

tacit knowledge – mostly contained in employees’

brains. The latter encourages employees to share

their knowledge by maximizing the interactions

between them; for example, by putting in place

discussion groups or informal meetings.

For SME, the personalization strategy is often

the most cost-effective way of transferring

experience. However, there are only a few

guidelines as explained in (Hermann and al, 2007)

that are designed explicitly for SME.

4 APPLYING ACTION

RESEARCH IN KNOWLEDGE

MANAGEMENT

This section describes the first two activities

completed so far. They were conducted in order to

propose such appropriate guidelines:

 Diagnosing the current knowledge

management practices;

 Planning the needed actions and writing

knowledge management techniques for

experimentation.

4.1 Diagnosis: SME Needs

The first phase was to collect SME needs on

knowledge management techniques. To do this, a

questionnaire was created and used to collect

requirements from SME about software

improvement process and knowledge management.

The elaboration of the questionnaire and the first

results of the survey were published in (Bjørnson

and Dingsøyr, 2009). This questionnaire addressed

the current and future interests in knowledge

management among 15 SME active in software

development and delivery. The questionnaire was

designed in such a way that any company could

understand it and provide useful input.

KMIS 2009 - International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Sharing

314

The core of the questionnaire was about the

current and future interests of the SME in

knowledge management schools described in the

remaining of this section. More specifically, the

questions were a set of statements concerning

approaches to knowledge management. For each

statement, the SME were asked to state how well

this statement fits in:

 the current situation inside the company

 the future importance in the company in a

mid-term (3 years)

The statements concerned the following knowledge

management approaches/schools as described in

(Earl, 2001):

 The System school: using knowledge bases;

 The Cartographic school: using yellow pages;

 The Engineering school: using procedures;

 The Organizational school: using discussion

groups;

 The Spatial school: adapting the work

environment.

A gap analysis – an analysis of the difference

between the scores given in two situations – was

carried out to compare the current and future

interests of all the interviewed SME about

statements linked to the listed knowledge

management schools. Figure 1 presents the outcome

of this gap analysis for all interviewed SME.

Gap Analyis

0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0

1.2

System Cartographic Engineering Organizational Spatial

School

Score

Figure 1: Combined gap analysis.

For example, in this case, the spatial school had

the lowest gap with 0.41; this means that on average

the score given by SME to current and future interest

about the implementation of techniques from the

Spatial School are quite close. This experiment

showed that the System school, the Engineering

school and the Organizational school had the

greatest gaps.

4.2 Planning: From the Assessment

to the Knowledge Technique

The methodology is based on the framework of

(Habra and al, 1999). This framework is depicted in

Figure 2 and it explains that any software process

improvement has to adhere to the company’s goal.

In this experiment, the section of the questionnaire

about the current and future interests in knowledge

management approaches tried to extract the success

factors that are already present in the interviewed

SME. These success factors are related to the

management, the current practices in software

development, and the allocated resources – time,

people and money. They constitute the basis for the

software process improvement that facilitates

improved practices, hence contributing to the

satisfaction with the software’s goal and also with

the company’s goal.

Figure 2: Framework for software process improvement.

The level of practice is derived by analyzing the

answers given by a company related to its “current

situation”.

Company B1 - Current Knowledge Management Level of Practices

0.5

1.5

2.5

3.5

4.5

Systems Cartographic Engineering Organizational Spatial

Score

Figure 3: Current Knowledge Management Level of

Practice.

IMPROVING SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT IN SME THROUGH KNOWLEDGE SHARING - A Practical Approach

315

In Figure 3, Company B1 declares that it has a

high level of practice in Systems schools techniques

for knowledge management, and a lower level of

practice in techniques from the Organizational

school. Hence a technique related to this school was

proposed to Company B1.

5 RELATED WORKS

Our work is related to the activities of the ISO/IEC

JTC1-SC7 working group 24 (WG24). This working

group was created to address the application of

standards among Very Small Enterprises – from 1 to

9 employees. Like many knowledge management

techniques, the ISO standards target the large

companies and are not adapted to the size and the

maturity level of the VSE. The objective of WG24 is

to adapt existing standard to the needs of VSE.

(Laporte, Alexandre, and Renault, 2008).

As in (Handzic, 2006) this experiment showed

that a Knowledge Management initiative should be

aligned with the overall business strategy to attain

success. As suggested, an audit on the current

knowledge assets and resources should be made.

6 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE

WORK

SME need practical knowledge management

techniques but unfortunately, current techniques are

seldom adapted to their size and context.

In order to fill this gap, we performed an

experiment conducted with SME active in software

development and delivery using the action research

paradigm that consisted of the following phases:

 Diagnosis of the current knowledge

management practices: we collected and

analysed the requirements from the SME

 Planning of the needed actions: it consisted of

the research and writing of suitable knowledge

management techniques that we presented to

SME for internal application.

At this time, it is difficult to draw conclusions on

the results, given the small sample of interviewed

SME. The following steps are still to be taken:

 Implementation of the technique by SME and

collecting of feedback on the actual

application of the technique.

 Evaluation of the situation after the

implementation of the technique

 Reflection and improvement on the

implemented technique

In many cases, the interviewed SME had

difficulties to identify its actual needs in knowledge

management techniques. The questionnaire will be

improved with a section allowing a quick assessment

of the current situation in the implementation of

good practices in knowledge management. This

assessment will help SME to identify the appropriate

knowledge management technique to be

implemented on the basis of their respective scores.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This experiment and research was carried out as part

of the “EXTRA” European project, funded by

DGTRE - Walloon Regional Ministry - Directorate

General for Technologies, Research and Energy,

Belgium. We would also like to express our

gratitude to other EXTRA project partners: SINTEF

(Norway) and CITEA (Cyprus).

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