The concept of "Ba" applied to Software Engineering

Abstract

Software development is a knowledge-intensive activity. Software products usually start as a simple idea, or a vision, and then progress towards a final deliverable product. Along this evolution, there is a lot of knowledge that is captured, organized, and shared, leading to new knowledge, both as a whole and within specific development activities. The concept of "Ba" provides a foundation to advance individual and collective knowledge, which describes knowledge creation as a spiral involving tacit and explicit knowledge: the Socialization, Externalization, Combination, Internalization model (a.k.a. SECI model). By applying this foundation to software development, we found issues that may hinder the effective knowledge management cycle. In this paper, we present a vision and a set of requirements for tools to overcome such issues and therefore better support the whole process of software knowledge evolution.