Tacit Knowledge Transfer in Agile Software Development

Sammanfattning: Background. Software companies make frequent development in their software products to improve their quality. Agile software development (ASD) helps in the rapid delivery of the software product with consistent quality to the customer. Agile Software development shares a lot of characteristics with knowledge-intensive works, and it also needs lot of knowledge from different domains of both human and com- puting domains. Knowledge is defined as a belief of one individual capability for an effective action. Tacit knowledge is a category of the knowledge management which is defined an individuals’ memory, action or beliefs. Moreover, tacit knowledge plays a crucial role in ASD. However, tacit knowledge is hard to transfer among team mem- bers as tacit knowledge is based on an individual experience. Tacit knowledge is not documented for further reference so there is a need to study how efficiently can tacit knowledge is currently being transferred in the industry, what challenges are being faced in tacit knowledge transfer and the mitigation strategies used to overcome the tacit knowledge transfer challenges. Objectives. In this present thesis, we focused on how tacit knowledge is being transferred among team members in agile software development. Objective 1: To identify the current tacit knowledge transfer mechanism in agile software development. Objective 2: To identify challenges in managing tacit knowledge transfer between team members in Agile software development. Objective 3: To explore mitigation strategies to overcome the challenges faced dur- ing tacit knowledge transfer. Methods. In this study, SLR and interviews were implemented to achieve the objective. SLR was used to achieve the first two objectives, and interviews were conducted to achieve all the objectives. Results. From SLR, a total of 21 challenges and 12 transfer mechanisms have been identified whereas, from the interviews, a total of 12 challenges, 8 transfer mecha- nisms, and 7 mitigation strategies have been identified. There were new challenges and transfer mechanisms identified in both research methods. Some of the transfer mechanisms consist of daily scrum calls and day-to-day forums among the teams. Both the research methods’ results indicate that one of the most challenging parts while transferring tacit knowledge is the lack of critical thinking with human orienta- tion. Based on the interviews, some of the mitigation strategies such as regular sprint meetings, and online whiteboarding were considered to overcome the tacit knowledge transfer challenges. Conclusions. Based on the challenges identified from the interview, it is evident that teams working in distributed teams are facing more challenges in transferring tacit knowledge, and tacit knowledge transfer sessions should be recorded to reduce the challenges.