KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT IN GLOBALLY DISTRIBUTED AGILE PROJECTS IN SRI LANKAN EXPERIENCE

Abstract

Knowledge Management (KM) among distributed agile projects is essential for success in global software development. Agile methodologies are most popular software development methodologies that help organizations deliver high quality product rapidly. When using agile methods for software projects development organizations have been found many positive effects. Sri Lankan software organizations are managing their knowledge in varies ways to increase and improve software projects performance. Therefor it is critical to investigate the importance of knowledge management regarding to identify, storing, sharing and acquisition. This study investigated the knowledge management practices in a number of distributed agile projects which are applied in Sri Lanka and evaluate how projects from different locations are share and manage their knowledge by using the knowledge management practices. This study revealed that 75 Sri Lankan software companies can identify, store, share and acquire the relevant knowledge and apply it to the projects. This is done by conducting a quantitative questionnaire over a period of time. Questionnaire was designed considering knowledge identification, knowledge acquisition, knowledge sharing and knowledge storing based on the previous literature covering dependent variable. Selected respondents are playing different job roles such as scrum master, line manager, software engineer, project manager and team leader from different organizations. Majority of the respondents successfully used the scrum method and practices KM practices. Structural equation modelling is used to establish relationship among variables, so as to assess both structural model and measurement model. According to findings associations with knowledge identification, knowledge acquisition and knowledge sharing were identified to have a significant impact on knowledge management while, knowledge storing depict no significant relationship. Findings further brainstorming and group meetings, wiki tools, start-up meeting, scrum board, GitHub and Skype are used as the communication tools, weekly workshop, special meetings with clients and third parties and former training for IT and non-IT as the main practices in Sri Lankan software companies.