A pilot study of productive versus nonproductive knowledge acquisition in embedded software development
Embedded software development involves many knowledge acquisition (KA) tasks that collectively account for a significant proportion of development costs. This paper presents a pilot study that used case studies to investigate the extent to which knowledge acquired in learning tasks was used in developing a final product. Data obtained from the case studies were used to construct event chains, which trace the amount of time spent on KA tasks and the types of knowledge acquired in individual learning tasks. Knowledge acquired was separated into three categories: knowledge of data, knowledge of process, and knowledge of innovation. Each top-level category was further partitioned into productive and nonproductive knowledge depending on whether the knowledge was, or was not used, in the construction of the final product. The event chains were processed to visualize the chronological progression of how knowledge acquired in the separate categories moved between subcategories of productive and nonproductive knowledge as development progressed. Results of this analysis show trends in KA for the case studies investigated, which we plan to use in the design of future work on this topic.
knowledge acquisition embedded software development knowledge management knowledge taxonomy