Learning Software Organizations

"Learning Software Organizations" (LSO) is the title of a series of annual workshops that has started in 1999. It is a forum for software professionals and researchers interested in organizational learning within software development environments. The workshop fosters interdisciplinary experience sharing on topics such as software process improvement, personal competence development, technology transfer and innovation management, socio-psychological aspects of learning, as well as enabling technology.

The workshop proceedings are a recommended information source for practical experience with knowledge management in software engineering. An overview can be gained from the LSO homepage. Selected contributions to LSO 1999 and SEKE 1999 have been published in the following book.

Günther Ruhe, Frank Bomarius (Eds.). Learning Software Organizations: Methodology and Applications. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 1756, Springer, Berlin, 2000.

Knowledge Management & Software Engineering

There are several specialized resources on knowledge management and software engineering available. The Learning Software Organizations (LSO) workshop series and books have already been mentioned above.

Another book on knowledge management and software engineering has been published in 2003:

Aybüke Aurum, Ross Jeffery, Claes Wohlin, Meliha Handzic (Eds.). Managing Software Engineering Knowledge. Springer, Berlin, 2003.

A good survey of knowledge management in software engineering provides the special issue of IEEE Software from May/June 2002.

Some practical advise on knowledge management can also be found in the proceeding of the Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE) conferences, as well as in the International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering.

A DACS state-of-the-art report on knowledge management in software engineering introduces key concepts and recommended practice.

SoftwareDioxide.com is a portal specialized on software engineering, knowledge management, and project management.

The Experience Factory

The Experience Factory (EF) is a concept for organizational learning in software environments developed by Victor Basili, Frank McGarry, and others at NASA GSFC's Software Engineering Laboratory (SEL). The SEL's website contains many resources that document and explain the Experience Factory.

Other research initiatives and projects have added to the Experience Factory concept, such as the European research projects PERFECT, PROFES, and SPIKE.

Collaborative Learning

Software development raises many needs for various kinds of learning. Collaborative learning has proven a very effective method for becoming acquainted with and mastering new competence areas. The European research project CORONET has developed a learning methodology, CORONET-Train, which focuses on collaborative and on-demand learning within Software Engineering corporate learning networks.

Project Retrospectives: Learning from Looking Back

Project retrospectives are a formal method for performing team-based review sessions to maximize what you learn from each project. It is an effective and well-proven method for retrospective learning, forming stronger teams, and pragmatic, people-based knowledge management and improvement.

This website contains a special section on project retrospectives.

WikiWikiWeb: The Wiki

"Wiki" is a Hawaiian word, meaning something like "quick" and "informal". The WikiWikiWeb (aka Wiki) is an open source collaboration server technology that enables users to access, browse, and edit hypertext pages in a very open and flexible way. The Wiki concept, created by Ward Cunningham, is becoming more and more popular as a collaboration and knowledge documentation tool in developer communities, software projects, consultancy companies, and far beyond.

The best way to become acquainted with the Wiki concept is to visit one of the many established or emerging Wikis in the internet - for instance, Ward Cunningham's original WikiWikiWeb home or WikiPedia, a collaboratively authored encyclopedia (with German version). It also contains entries on Software Engineering and Software-Technik.

You might also be interested in the Wiki book:

Bo Leuf and Ward Cunningham. The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web. Addison Wesley, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2001.

Knowledge Management Resources

HBS Working Knowledge, a website of the Harvard Business School, collects many resources around knowledge management and organizational learning.

Other knowledge management portals are the Melcrum website, KMResource.com, and Wissenskapital.de.

Knowledge Management Literature

Thomas H. Davenport and Laurence Prusak. Working Knowledge: How Organizations Manage What they Know. HBS Press, Boston, MA, 1998.

Harvard Business Review. Harvard Business Review on Knowledge Management. HBS Press, Boston, MA, 1998.

Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi. The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation. Oxford University Press, New York, NY, 1995

Peter Senge. The Fifth's Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. Doubleday-Currency, New York, NY, 1990.