Tool Support for Inter-team Learning in Agile Software Organizations

The need for organizational learning support is common among all software development companies but is not addressed by agile software methods practitioners. The typical Experience Factory approach to address organizational learning in software companies often stresses structured and explicit knowledge as well as controlled learning mechanisms. In contrast, the Communities of Practice approach relies more on tacit knowledge and self-organization. To bridge the gap between these two conflicting approaches, this paper proposes a suite of lightweight knowledge sharing tools by which software organizations are given the flexibility to control how structured and controlled their learning processes are. Initial results from early evaluations of the proposed tools are also given.