Supplementary material of the study "Using Skill Manifestations to identify Who Knows What in Software Organizations"

Supplementary MaterialSoftware development is a knowledge-intensive activity, and its success in an organization relies deeply on knowledge sharing. Knowledge management challenges are often increased in agile environments, which involve a lot of tacit knowledge, commonly acquired through experiences and hard to make explicit. Therefore, knowledge sharing among practitioners is crucial. However, identifying suitable experts to share specific knowledge is not trivial. It involves not only discovering the individuals with the desired knowledge but also considering other factors that may improve the expert responsiveness, such as social connections and availability. Moreover, the data overload problem and the specific nature of the experts’ knowledge can hinder people from finding experts with the knowledge they require. Expert-finding systems have been proposed to address this issue. They are information retrieval systems that identify candidate experts and rank them based on their expertise in a given subject. Developing expert-finding systems is challenging due to the involvement of complex concepts such as expertise, skill, knowledge, and other related concepts. Additionally, integrating diverse heterogeneous sources that offer evidence of expertise poses a difficulty. Ontologies can be helpful in this matter by providing semantics to data and addressing semantic conflicts that can lead to data misuse or misinterpretation. Aiming to benefit from the use of ontologies, we proposed iKnow, an approach based on a well-founded conceptualization that helps in the development of systems to find who knows what in a software organization considering data stored in the organization repositories and non-technical factors that may affect knowledge sharing. An expert-finding system was developed using iKnow, demonstrating the proposal's feasibility. The system was used to support expert identification for knowledge-sharing purposes within a company. The preliminary results suggest that the system built by following our approach is useful. iKnow was developed in the context of a master’s research. This paper provides an overview of the research and its main results.This package contains supplementary material of the performed study. It contains: EXPERTFY EVALUATION ARTIFACTS Instructions that were followed by the participants: instructions.pdf The questionaire participants answered: forms.pdf The response of the participants (in Portuguese): responses.pdf EXPERTFY DEVELOPMENT REPORT A report regarding ExpertFY development: iknow-application-report.pdf