Toward a practical solution for capturing knowledge for software projects

Rarely has a professional field evolved as quickly as software development. Software organizations are continuously struggling to keep abreast of new technologies frequently changing customer requirements; and increasingly complex software architectures, methods, and tools. Recently, many organizations have come to understand that to succeed in the future, they must manage and use knowledge more effectively at individual, team, and organizational levels. Efficient creation, distribution, and reuse of up-to-date knowledge are critical success factors that unfortunately remain difficult to achieve in practice. Knowledge-sharing events between group members have proven to be a better way of sharing knowledge than the database, but the results of these events could never be packaged and reused for future projects. One company's solution was to develop a needs-based approach that would deliver knowledge just in time.