AN ACQUISITION KNOWLEDGE PROCESS FOR SOFTWARE

DEVELOPMENT

Knowledge Acquisition for a Software Process Implementation Environment

Sandro Ronaldo Bezerra Oliveira

Centro de Ciências Exatas e Tecnologia – Universidade da Amazônia (UNAMA)

Av. Alcindo Cacela, 287, 66060-902 – Belém – PA – Brasil

Alexandre Marcos Lins de Vasconcelos, Albérico Lima de Pena Júnior, Lúcio Câmara e Silva

Centro de Informática – Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (UFPE)

Caixa Postal 7851 – 50732-970 – Recife – PE – Brasil

Keywords: Knowledge Acquisition, Process, Tool,

Software Development Environment.

Abstract: Knowledge must be managed efficiently through the capture, maintenance and dissemination of it in an

organization. However, knowledge related to business processes execution is distributed in documents,

corporative systems and in key-members minds making the access, preservation and distribution of this

knowledge to other members more difficult. In this context, systematic knowledge acquisition processes are

necessary to acquire and preserve organizational knowledge. This work presents a process to acquire tacit

and explicit organization members’ knowledge related to business processes, and the functionalities of a

tool developed to support the execution of this process in a software development context. This tool is part

of a software process implementation environment, called ImPProS, developed at CIn/UFPE – Center of

Informatics/Federal University of Pernambuco.

1 INTRODUCTION

The knowledge management promotes the

intellectual capital through the support of the

organizational learning and the maintenance of an

organizational memory. In this way, the organization

acquires abilities to continuously learn about the

activities of business processes, besides increasing

the knowledge about the customers, technologies

and performance areas (Souza, 2003). Organizations

that develop software, for example, have highly

dynamic business processes, use many technologies

and the staff change is often high. Thus, it is very

important to manage in an adequate way the

knowledge that the members of these organizations

have, as well as the knowledge on the technologies

used for the accomplishment of the software

development activities. In this way, it is possible to

improve the processes execution, besides preserving

the knowledge when the members leave the

organization (Truex, 1999).

The software development process activities are

namic (i.e., many problems appear during the

execution of activities and project decisions must be

taken constantly) (Balduino, 2002). The knowledge

acquisition used by executants during the

development process allows that the organization

understands its processes better. However, it is

difficult of being carried through, since the

developers have difficulties to manage the

knowledge due to little or no dedicated time to

analyse the problems that happened and on the

decisions taken during the accomplishment of the

process activities. Thus, the knowledge acquisition

process must be integrated to the software

development process to reduce the impact in the

normal work routine and the effort of knowledge

registering. To support this process, an infrastructure

of knowledge acquisition must be developed

allowing that many knowledge types are captured

from multiple sources (Montoni, 2003).

Thus, the definition of a new software process

plementation environment was considered, called

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Ronaldo Bezerra Oliveira S., Marcos Lins de Vasconcelos A., Lima de Pena Júnior A. and Câmara e Silva L. (2006).

AN ACQUISITION KNOWLEDGE PROCESS FOR SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT - Knowledge Acquisition for a Software Process Implementation

Environment.

In Proceedings of the First International Conference on Software and Data Technologies, pages 253-256

DOI: 10.5220/0001319602530256

 SciTePress

ImPProS (Oliveira, 2005). This environment will

make it possible the specification of the processes in

accordance with a specific project domain and the

characteristics of the organization; the instantiation

of the process for projects properties; its simulation

from the configuration parameters (stated period,

pressures, cost, resources, etc.); its execution based

on the organizational process; and its evaluation

through metrics collected about its execution.

However, the identification, contextualization,

acquisition, use and evolution of the knowledge are

not a trivial task in this environment. In order to

support the Knowledge Management during the

software process implementation in ImPProS, we

consider a dynamic model of knowledge

management and its automation by means of a tool.

Besides this introductory section, the paper

presents other four sections. Section 2 describes the

properties that compose the software process

implementation environment. In section 3 the

detailing of the dynamic model of knowledge

acquisition is presented. Finally, section 4 presents

the final considerations of this paper.

2 ImPProS: A SOFTWARE

PROCESS IMPLEMENTATION

ENVIRONMENT

The ImPProS is a project which is being performed

at the Center of Informatic of UFPE – Federal

University of Pernambuco with the partnership of

UNAMA - University of Amazônia, and financed by

CNPq - National Agency for Scientific and

Technological Development. The objective of

ImPProS is the creation of an environment to

support the implementation of a software process in

an organization in a gradual way. The "gradual"

term means that the implementation of the process is

improved with the experiences learned in its

definition, simulation, execution and evaluation. The

ImPProS is composed of a cooperative environment,

formed by nine main tools:

• ProDefiner: it provides the definition of

software process from the analysis of specific

characteristics;

• ProSimulator: it makes possible the

simulation of a software process instantiated

from an execution plan of the process and

thus allows to foresee problems;

• ProEnacter: it allows the automated

execution and monitoring of a software

process by a project team;

• ProEvaluator: it provides the evaluation of

software process execution from the analyses

of qualitative and quantitative criteria;

• ProImprove: it makes possible the systematic

execution of activities regarding the software

process improvement, based on the IDEAL

model;

• ProAnalyser: it allows the analyses and

decision taking concerning the evaluation

items which compose the software process;

• ProReuse: it provides the software process

reuse from the definition of project scope and

its adaptation to the use context;

• ProKnowledge: it makes possible the

collection, analyses and use of knowledge

learned during the execution of a software

process;

• ProConverter: it provides the conversion of

software process components defined for a

process (activities, artefacts, resources, etc.)

from the structures of quality norms/models.

3 A KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION

MODEL

This section presents the workflow that describe the

acquisition of tacit and explicit knowledge from

organization members related to the business

processes and the tool developed to support the

execution of this process in the software

development, the ProKnowledge. The explicit

knowledge is the one that can easily be expressed

through words and numbers or is represented in the

documents and data repositories. The knowledge

acquired from personal experiences and that is only

in the minds of the people is called tacit (Holz,

2001).

The dynamic model of knowledge acquisition

defined to ImPProS has the purpose of being generic

to make it possible the acquisition of different types

of knowledge in many contexts and business areas,

even so its initial conception has origin in software

processes. This model tends to allow the knowledge

definition used and created during the execution of

business processes in a non-invasive way

minimizing, thus, the shunting line of the normal

workflow the process executants and preventing

delays and imperfections in the execution of its

activities. Besides supporting the knowledge

acquisition, the model also supports the filtering of

the knowledge guarantee that only useful knowledge

for the organization are kept in the organizational

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knowledge repository. The knowledge revision is

also part of the dynamic model of acquisition to

adjust the content and the format of the knowledge

facilitating its use in different contexts.

The dynamic model considered in this work will

be presented by means of workflow. The workflow

represents a sequence of activities that are executed

to produce a value result for some business actors.

The flow uses the primitives presented in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Wokflow Primitives.

A description of the activities, which supply

functional support to the knowledge management,

defined in the workflow is presented. These

activities are characterized as macro-activities in

order to group tasks in accordance with its vision of

use. Figure 2 illustrates the main flow of these

macro-activities and the dependence between them.

a) Keeping Knowledge: this activity aims to

acquire from specialists in a process, explicit

knowledge about description of the process activities

and tacit knowledge used in the taking of decisions

about the process activities. The knowledge

acquisition can be carried through at two different

moments: acquisition independent of the process

execution, and; acquisition during the process

execution. All the acquired knowledge is stored in

an intermediate base to be evaluated by a knowledge

evaluation committee. Initially the user defines the

context in which the knowledge will be managed

(i.e. the application area of the knowledge, for

example: Software Processes); later the user needs to

define keywords that will allow the indexation and

retrieval of the knowledge. Finally, the next step is

the identification the type of knowledge that he/she

desires to register (for example: Learned lesson,

Idea, Doubt, etc.), supplying information referring

the type of identified knowledge and registering the

knowledge item.

b) Packing Knowledge: the goal of this activity

is to adapt the content of evaluated knowledge the

intermediate base and to transform the format of

acquisition of this knowledge into a format adjusted

for its transference. This activity indexes the

knowledge in the repository of organization to be

recouped during the process execution by members.

c) Filtering Knowledge: this activity aims to

verify adequacy the format of representation and the

content of knowledge items registered in the

intermediate base (i.e. in this activity, it is verified

whether the knowledge items have value and if they

can be reused). Initially knowledge items are

attributed to the evaluation committee members in

order to evaluate knowledge items; therefore these

members are notified; each member of the

evaluation committee must elaborate a point of view

of its evaluation according to defined criteria

(Correctness, Originality and Relevance,

Completeness, Adequacy, Utility, Consistency);

thus, the evaluation committee coordinator analysis

the individual evaluations, defines the consensus and

takes the pertinent decision about the evaluation of

knowledge item (Keeping or Removing it from the

Knowledge Base).

d) Spreading Knowledge: the goal of this

activity is to communicate to the interested public

about the new knowledge item available. The

communication must contain information about the

content of item and its use context.

e) Consulting Knowledge: the purpose of this

activity is making it possible that the interested users

in the knowledge kept in the organization repository

have access and manipulate these information and its

applications. The user has still the possibility to

visualize details of the knowledge consulted.

f) Inserting Additional Commentary: this

activity allows that commentaries of other users

about knowledge can also be visualized and kept.

These commentaries increase the confidence of the

users in the knowledge being consulted due to other

users that had used the knowledge and had gotten

benefits with its use. The commentaries of users

about knowledge can also be useful during the

maintenance of the organization repository to

identify the knowledge stored that really is bringing

benefits for the organization.

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Software Process Implementation Environment

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4 FINAL CONSIDERATION AND

FUTURE WORK

This work presented a proposal for knowledge

acquisition independent of the application context of

this knowledge. The proposal consists of acquiring,

filtering and packing tacit and explicit knowledge of

organization members related to the business

processes according to a systematic and controlled

process.

A tool was developed to support the execution of

this process and an application of this tool was

carried through in the software development context.

This tool was integrated to the ImPProS

environment and its support tools.

An experimental study is be planned to be

executed in the context of micro and small

companies which develops software from which one

it will be possible to evaluate the benefits of

knowledge acquisition approach and to identify

improvements to be carried through in this approach.

Currently, the tool was applied in the academic

context, during the development of research projects

by members of the ImPProS group at CIn/UFPE.

REFERENCES

Balduino, R., 2002. Implementação de um processo de

desenvolvimento de software: uma abordagem passo-

a-passo, Rational Software White Paper.

Holz, H., Könnecker, R, Maurer, F., 2001. Task-Specific

Knowledge management in a Process-Centred SEE”,

K.-D. Althoff, Feldmann, and W. Müller (Eds.): LSO

2001, LNCS 2176.

Montoni, M. A., 2003. Aquisição de Conhecimento: Uma

Aplicação no Processo de Desenvolvimento de

Software, Dissertação de Mestrado, COPPE/UFRJ.

Oliveira, S. R. B., Vasconcelos, A. M. L., Rouiller, A. C.,

2005. Uma Proposta de um Ambiente de

Implementação de Processo de Software, Revista

InfoComp – Revista de Ciência da Computação da

UFLA – vol. 4, n. 1, Lavras-MG.

Rocha, A. R. C., Maldonado, J. C. and Weber, K. C.,

2001. Qualidade de software: teoria e prática, São

Paulo: Prentice-Hall.

Souza, G. S., 2003. Representação da Distribuição do

Conhecimento, Habilidades e Experiências através da

Estrutura Organizacional, Tese de Doutorado,

COPPE/UFRJ.

Truex, D. P., Baskerville, R., Klein, H., 1999. Growing

Systems in Emergent Organizations, Communications

of the ACM, v. 42, n. 8 (Aug.), pp. 117-123.

Figure 2: The Knowledge Acquisition Workflow in the ImPProS.

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