Abstract
With the increase of management buy-in into the agile methodology, many companies within South Africa have begun adopting agile ways of work to efficiently, respond to change and be more productive. The agile framework is more than a project management methodology and can be used to promote knowledge sharing. This is fitting because agile practices often require intense collaboration and communication and therefore promotes the creation and transfer of tacit knowledge among team members. This research aims to understand the contextual experiences of knowledge sharing and collaboration for agile software development within scrum teams in South Africa. The objective is to understand the role of scrum in knowledge sharing within scrum teams and identify the effect of scrum on the knowledge sharing culture. A questionnaire containing semi-structured interview questions was used to gather responses from 61 people who make use of agile practices in their workplaces within South Africa. The data collected was analysed through thematic analysis with the support of Atlas.ti 8 Windows as a qualitative data analysis tool. The research findings indicate that agile practices do facilitate focused knowledge sharing and collaboration. The different scrum events that have been investigated in this study indicated that scrum practices increase focus and clarity, opportunities for knowledge sharing, collaboration, and further enhances motivation to share knowledge. Scrum events also influence collaboration by increasing and improving communication, creating transparency, establishing opportunities to give and receive feedback, and facilitating inspection and adaption of processes. For organizations that want to establish good knowledge management practices, implementing scrum helps facilitate knowledge sharing. Establishing good scrum practices can lead to the conversion of knowledge from one form to the other throughout the knowleade management cycle: creation, distribution (or sharing), and use. Reviewing the data collected in this research, it is clear that knowledge sharing is inherent in scrum and is made to thrive as a result of effective collaboration among team members. One limitation of this study is that it was not a longitudinal study,thereby missing out on continuous observation as a data collection method. This would have provided this study with richer data to support the supposition that scrum facilitates knowledge sharing and collaboration. Future works need to focus on utilising other agile frameworks other than the scrum to explore the opportunities of their usage in software developments contexts.
M.Phil. (Information and Knowledge Management)