Knowledge temple: a collaborative knowledge sharing technique for agile software development

Despite the productive, flexible, and adaptive nature of agile development, it may suffer from knowledge sharing limitations. This includes knowledge loss due to retirement or high turnover rates of skilled professionals and knowledge hoarding due to interpersonal or organizational climate. The objective of this work is to build a knowledge sharing culture and collaboration norm in the workplace for small agile development teams with high turnover rates, where organizational success is not only maintained but also enhanced. The Knowledge Temple, the proposed approach, is hybrid, incorporating knowledge sharing and building models, such as cognitive apprenticeship, on-the-job-training, solo programming, pair programming, parallel peer programming, pair rotation, and knowledge repository creation. This hierarchical approach is designed as an iterative and incremental solution to share and create knowledge in a collaborative and cooperative fashion. A single-blind experiment was performed with the Innovation in Computing Research (iCORE) at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, where the Knowledge Temple technique was administered in three different projects with ten varied Temples. To evaluate this empirical experiment, Temple members' development contributions, a Knowledge Temple questionnaire, and observational outcomes were utilized. Consequently, the results of the Knowledge Temple experiment showed great potential for an impactful approach. The results indicate novice-novice inspiration to solve motivation issues. They also show development flexibility for expert developers that may increase the individual and collaborative productivity. Moreover, this new technique offers schedule flexibility for all the team members, hands-on knowledge sharing for agile learners both master and apprentice supported, and good use of new knowledge sharing technologies to allow cooperative knowledge transformation and development.