The Impact of Socialization on the Use of Tacit Knowledge in the Process of Developing Software Products

Abstract

The factors that influence the performance of software development projects in IT enterprises have been a topic that still does not have conclusive results. Among these factors, one of the most important is knowledge management, since in the software development industry, it is necessary to disseminate the knowledge of the organizational processes that are intended to be solved with a software tool; therefore, the aim of the study is to determine the effect of the use of explicit and tacit knowledge on a software project performance. For this purpose, 451 questionnaires were collected and analyzed using structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The findings show that the value of tacit knowledge has a positive and significant association with performance, which has practical implications for the software industry in encouraging the socialization of tacit knowledge, thus improving the generation of knowledge in favor of the development and deployment of a software project, resulting in better artifacts of explicit documentation.