Title: Exploring the concept of knowledge driven software development

Abstract:

In the era of the knowledge economy, it is generally acknowledged that software engineering firms’ prevalent asset is the knowledge held within the organisation.  However, software development live cycles focus mainly on software features and day-to-day tasks.  The closest most processes come to maintaining a healthy knowledge infrastructure is through the use of documentation.

In this talk, I will give an overview of agile development practices as being the closest process that we have to maintaining a healthy knowledge infrastructure in an organisation.  We will then identify shortfalls in agile development practices in this regard and propose a knowledge-driven approach to software development.  We will attempt to answer these questions:

- How can one ensure focus on maintaining a healthy knowledge infrastructure within an organisation?
- How can we model knowledge in our organisation and to what level of detail should this be done?
- How do we model temporal aspects of knowledge?
- What metrics, measures and indicators can we provide to help us assess the health of knowledge in our organisation?