Accelerating the sharing of knowledge in order to speed up the process of enlarging software development teams: a practical example

In today's fast growing IT industry many companies are constantly experiencing shortages of software developers, a key resource in the computer-based world that we live in. This frustrating reality comes from the fact that training a competitive software developer is a long process that may take years which is incompatible with the much faster ups and downs of the software industry. As a consequence many managers from software development and consulting companies are attempting to accelerate the process of training software developers. The current article presents an example of knowledge sharing practice in which young graduates have been trained as ABAP programmers with the help of an accelerated knowledge sharing method that has enabled them to reach in only 4-6 months a level of expertise that has made them acceptable for top system integrators. Traditionally, for reaching such a level there would have been necessary almost 2 years of training on the job. The article focuses on the architecture of the knowledge sharing system and the roles of the persons involved. A simplified mathematical model of the success rate is also described. As a conclusion the article demonstrates that the time needed to acquire expertise as an ABAP programmer can be reduced from 2 years to 4-6 months with the help of knowledge sharing methods.