Capturing implicit software engineering knowledge

Abstract

It is commonly accepted that all forms of software engineering knowledge should be captured and stored in a repository. This knowledge enables us to learn from past development experience and promotes reuse. Unfortunately there is not much work in the software engineering literature that emphasizes the importance of capturing implicit knowledge for the repository. This paper begins with a critical literature review on the epistemological dimensions of knowledge (explicit and implicit knowledge) in software development. Then it speculates a lack of attention on the capture of knowledge for the software experience factory. It suggests that the source of implicit knowledge extends beyond the software development team which accumulates implicit knowledge during practice. In this paper we formulate a conceptual framework that captures the implicit knowledge, and then organize the knowledge in a useful form for the software experience factory. This paper emphasizes the importance of implicit knowledge both on the individual and collective levels and suggests a combination of knowledge capture techniques to achieve this end. Though not within the scope of this paper, we recognize that knowledge must be organized in a useful way for easy access.