The world of software development has become more adaptive and rapidly evolving than ever before. This means we need new ways to correlate our information and stay one step ahead of this constant change.

Knowledge Management is the best way to take advantage of the information that your team is already generating. By keeping all this information in one place, your team will have a valuable resource for current and future projects.

Is your software development team leaving valuable information on the table, or worse, working isolated in information silos? Let’s see how Knowledge Management can mitigate this unexpected source of downtime.

A Quick Intro to Knowledge Management

In order to talk about why your DevSecOps team needs Knowledge Management, we need to cover the basics of what Knowledge Management is.

In short, Knowledge Management is a system you have in place that allows you to capture information and distribute it among the people who need it the most. Think of it as like Wikipedia, but for your team or organization. A knowledge management tool is a program or software that stores all organizational information in one easy to access and easily shareable space.

Knowledge Management will allow your business to overcome common sources of brain drain such as onboarding new team members, losing senior coders, and be more resilient through the development process.

Knowledge Management, also called knowledgement, is typically managed using specialty software that acts as an internal wiki for your software company.

Why Dev Teams Need Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management can save your software development company money, as well as leave you better poised to handle the challenges that have come to define our industry.

Here’s how.

It Makes Managing Global Team Easier

One of the biggest challenges we face with contemporary software development is remote working and global teams.

Your DevSecOps team will likely be composed of individuals from around the world or at least people who are no longer sharing the same office.

Having a knowledge management system in place means that she’ll be able to capture all of the information generated by your team even if they’re not in the same building.

This will save your team plenty of time and having to ask duplicate questions or spend valuable development uptime researching information already discovered by different team members.

For example, if one team member finds a valuable resource for bleeding-edge UX design, that can be added to the Knowledge Management system, so all dev team members have access to that resource.

Streamlining Successive Iterations

The development pipeline has never been more important when it comes to software.

Security and iterations are now rolled into the development process itself. This continuous development environment is much more knowledge intensive than the old school way of developing software.

Whether you’re fixing bugs or responding to client requests, you’ll be making successive iterations of your software. Having a Knowledge Management system in place will allow you to track changes across generations and be better poised for making rapid changes.

It will also improve your response when it comes to important cybersecurity strategies.

The cybersecurity threat landscape is constantly evolving. The Knowledge Management database will allow your DevSecOps team to stay one step ahead of the latest threats.

Ready for Big Changes

If you’ve been in a software development world for any length of time, you’ll know that the only consistency is change.

This could be changes to the latest standards for exchange APIs or it could be a merger between your business and another.

Nothing disrupts development quite like these changes. Anything that causes you to shuffle the decks is also going to cause massive down time if you don’t have a Knowledge Management plan in place.

While Knowledge Management won’t completely mitigate the down time from these big changes, it will allow your development team to move through them with much more confidence and ease.

Working with Outsourced Teams

Another important benefit of a Knowledge Management system is that it will allow you to interface with outsourced teams much easier.

Outsourcing aspects of software development has become increasingly common. Whether it’s a specialized security team for a client that has decided to outsource an aspect of the development project, you need to be ready to work with new teams throughout the project.

Having a knowledge management system in place will allow you to seamlessly integrate with an else worst software development team. This allows you to have all of your pertinent information together in one location that the outsourced team can easily access and get up-to-date quickly.

Faster Onboarding for New Members

Speaking of getting development teams of today, one of the biggest sources of downtime is having to onboard new developers.

Even the most senior software developers are going to need to spend time catching up to how things are done with your business. This project is often very disorganized and winds up being more trial and error than a precision process.

Having a Knowledge Management system in place allows you to onboard new team members much easier. This allows you to correlate everything between your internal policies to the latest information on ongoing development projects.

All of your information is in one place so new employees can quickly catch up to where everyone else is at.

Key Takeaways

As software developers, we know that information is the single biggest resource that we have. The best way to manage the knowledge that your business is building is through a knowledge management system.

This will help you with everything from cybersecurity management, to successive generations, and even help you onboard new employees or get interface with an outsourced team.

Also Read: The Software Development Process

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