How has Japan become a major economic power, a world leader in the automotive and electronics industries? What is the secret of their success? The consensus has been that, though the Japanese are not particularly innovative, they are exceptionally skilful at imitation, at improving products that already exist. But now two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hiro Takeuchi, turn this conventional wisdom on its head: Japanese firms are successful, they contend, precisely because they are innovative, because they create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. Examining case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, 3M, GE, and the U.S. Marines, this book reveals how Japanese companies translate tacit to explicit knowledge and use it to produce new processes, products, and services.

The knowledge-creating company : how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation

Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions

The Fabric of Reality

Agile development practices respect tacit knowledge, makes communication more effective, and thus fosters the knowledge creation process. However the current agile methods, like XP, are focused on practices that individual teams or projects need, and the use of the methods in organizations consisting of multiple cooperating teams is difficult. The community of practice theory suggests that large agile organizations should have various overlapping, informal cross-team communities. This paper studies three agile methods developed at Nokia that use facilitated workshops to solve multiteam issues. The paper explains using communities of practices theory - why these methods work in multiteam settings. The results of this paper suggest that workshop practices that amass people from different parts of organizations to perform a specific well-defined task can be used effectively to solve issues that span over multiple teams and to build up communities of practice. This result suggests that the community of practice concept could provide a basis for adapting agile methods for the needs of large organizations.

Agile methods for large organizations - building communities of practice

Context Organizations combine agile approach and Distributed Software Development (DSD) in order to develop better quality software solutions in lesser time and cost. It helps to reap the benefits of both agile and distributed development but pose significant challenges and risks. Relatively scanty evidence of research on the risks prevailing in distributed agile development (DAD) has motivated this study. Objective This paper aims at creating a comprehensive set of risk factors that affect the performance of distributed agile development projects and identifies the risk management methods which are frequently used in practice for controlling those risks. Method The study is an exploration of practitioners’ experience using constant comparison method for analyzing in-depth interviews of thirteen practitioners and work documents of twenty-eight projects from thirteen different information technology (IT) organizations. The field experience was supported by extensive research literature on risk management in traditional, agile and distributed development. Results Analysis of qualitative data from interviews and project work documents resulted into categorization of forty-five DAD risk factors grouped under five core risk categories. The risk categories were mapped to Leavitt’s model of organizational change for facilitating the implementation of results in real world. The risk factors could be attributed to the conflicting properties of DSD and agile development. Besides that, some new risk factors have been experienced by practitioners and need further exploration as their understanding will help the practitioners to act on time. Conclusion Organizations are adopting DAD for developing solutions that caters to the changing business needs, while utilizing the global talent. Conflicting properties of DSD and agile approach pose several risks for DAD. This study gives a comprehensive categorization of the risks faced by the practitioners in managing DAD projects and presents frequently used methods to reduce their impact. The work fills the yawning research void in this field.

Categorization of risk factors for distributed agile projects

Extreme programming (XP) is an accepted and widely used agile software development method with active user communities worldwide. There exists a great deal of anecdotal evidence to support the use of XP in different situations. While some empirical evidence regarding the use of a certain composite of XP practices exist, no scientifically grounded theory exists. Based on the notion that software engineering is knowledge-intensive work, we show that generic knowledge management theories can be used to explain how XP practices improve an organization's agility. Tuomi's [I. Tuomi, (!999)] model for knowledge creation is used to explain the different practices of XP. This gives a new perspective to agile processes and enables others to express agile practices in a more generic way. It is shown that agility is a result of a more effective knowledge creation process involving both the customer and development team. Based on this, practical implications and future research needs are identified.

Abrahamsson

Papers

Digging into the fundamentals of extreme programming building the theoretical base for agile methods