Knowledge Sharing Interactions in Collaborative Software Maintenance Environment

In collaborative Software Maintenance (SM) environment, knowledge sharing is vital to ensure various parties have the necessary information to perform SM tasks. However, patterns of knowledge sharing interactions within the networked organization of SM Community of Practice (CoP) and factors that influence these interactions are yet to be established. We study the dialogues captured in the Software Configuration Management (SCM) tool used by a global SM organization and use Pajek, a Social Network Analysis (SNA) tool, to map the interactions among users and maintenance personnel. The results revealed technical, planning and domain information as most shared information. Network bottlenecks are also identified, which evolves around a key development manager, a development team leader and a systems analyst. Also, there are lack of direct interactions between programmers and domain knowledge providers. As such, the SM environment could benefit from process automations on selected tasks of the above bottleneck areas to ensure knowledge are shared across the board.