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Legislations impose requirements on the manufacturing of machinery. Typically, these requirements are interpreted and refined by (domain‐specific) technical committees and published in terms of standards. At the company level, these refined requirements are further interpreted, refined, and documented in terms of internal processes. Due to the proliferation of (interdependent) legislations and standards and the consequent increase of the cognitive complexity, at the company level, manual knowledge management is becoming more and more challenging and requires automated decision support. Despite the availability of approaches aimed at automating the decision support, no one offers a satisfactory solution. In this paper, we focus on knowledge management for process compliance and we propose a novel structured ontology. Our ontology aims at mastering (by dividing and conquering via tracing) the cognitive complexity of the compliance problem, when heterogeneous and sometimes geographically distributed knowledge‐driven organizational structures (legal department, standardization department, etc.) are involved and need to communicate. We also illustrate the potential usefulness of our proposed ontology in the context of pumps manufacturing and safety process compliance with the Machinery Directive and related harmonized standards including EN 809:1998+A1. Specifically, first, we identify the competencies that characterize departments and interdepartment interactions, then we formulate an initial set of competency questions that translate those identified competencies, then we show how the ontology can be exploited to retrieve the answers to the questions and how the answers can be exploited to build a justification for compliance. Precisely, we propose an argumentation pattern given in two different argumentation notations, and we show how it can be partly instantiated by exploiting the returned answers. The illustration also partly covers the compliance with the Machinery Regulation, expected to replace the Machinery Directive by January 2027. Finally, we sketch our intended future work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue including global software engineering, the significance of knowledge management and software architecture.

This paper describes a multi-model methodology that implements a smooth and continuous process improvement, depending on the organization's business goals and allowing users to establish their improvement implementation pace. The methodology focuses on basic process components known as 'best practices'. Besides, it covers following the topics: knowledge management and change management. The methodology description and the results of a case study on project management process are included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Service Orientation was introduced as the solution for retaining and rehabilitating legacy assets, both researchers and practitioners proposed techniques, methods, and guidelines for SOA migration. With so much hype surrounding SOA, it is not surprising that the concept was interpreted in many different ways, and consequently, different approaches to SOA migration were proposed. Accordingly, soon there was an abundance of methods that were hard to compare and eventually adopt. Against this backdrop, this paper reports on a systematic literature review that was conducted to extract the categories of SOA migration proposed by the research community. We provide the state-of-the-art in SOA migration approaches, and discuss categories of activities carried out and knowledge elements used or produced in those approaches. From such categorization, we derive a reference model, called SOA migration frame of reference, that can be used for selecting and defining SOA migration approaches. As a co-product of the analysis, we shed light on how SOA migration is perceived in the field, which further points to promising future research directions. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SUMMARY Software process improvement in software development organizations is a complex task that can be solved using knowledge management strategies. The definition and use of process patterns is a proven approach to apply knowledge management strategies in software engineering organizations. One of the main problems for the effective application of process patterns is the difficulty of formalizing the knowledge about the development process using these approaches. In this paper, a framework to manage software project patterns is presented. This framework is composed of a model called reusable project pattern (RPP) and a tool called sdpReuser. It is able to formalize the knowledge on software development projects from software development methodologies, reference frameworks, best practices and also tacit knowledge, useful to software engineers. The authors carried out a case study at the University Carlos III of Madrid, where junior software engineers used RPP. This study shows that the quality of pattern formalization correlates with experience in specific software engineering methods, the quality of the references in software engineering practices and the collaboration among software engineers to develop an RPP. It also analyzed the usefulness of RPP information elements to help software engineers to identify the most appropriate RPP and how to adapt it to project restrictions. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Innovative product development is highly dependent on new product ideas and product information. This especially applies to companies that obtain their competitive advantages by technological lead like the automotive supplier industry. Innovation management in these industries has to focus on an efficient idea generation, implementation and capitalisation, and on technology tracking. This paper gives an insight into the industry-sector-specific characteristics of innovation management within the automotive supplier industry, and outlines a basic scheme of an innovation management system that aims at improving the existing innovation management at the automotive supplier Kolbenschmidt Pierburg AG. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most software development firms have adopted the concepts of global software development (GSD) to develop high‐quality and low‐cost products. However, GSD is not a straightforward process. It is associated with many challenges that are mostly related to requirements change management (RCM). In this study, we explore the motivators that contribute to managing RCM activities in the GSD environment. We extracted a total of 25 motivators using the systematic literature review (SLR) approach and conducted a survey study to empirically evaluate the findings of the SLR. The results of the applied Spearman's statistical test show that the findings of the SLR and survey study had a positive moderate correlation (rs(25) = 0.566). We further analyzed the reported motivators according to organization size. Finally, we developed taxonomies of the identified motivators based on the framework proposed by Ramasubbu and the project management body of knowledge. We believe that the taxonomies provide a robust framework for tackling the challenges of RCM, which is significant for the success and evolution of GSD firms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Knowledge sharing is by far the most important component of a knowledge management programme. Organizations strive to gain competitive advantage through efficiencies. When organizations realize that organizational knowledge is by far the most valuable resource, they need to find ways for efficient and effective knowledge sharing. We explore the barriers to knowledge sharing especially in virtual and multicultural teams. In particular, we unfold the human and cultural challenges that can create added competitive value for virtual and networked organizations. We conclude that the ideal environment and working practices will be to change the mindset and behaviour of team members so that instead of perceiving knowledge sharing as an extra task for the team members, isolated from the knowledge of other team members, it (knowledge sharing) becomes the natural way to work for everyone. Finally, we propose the dynamic knowledge acquisition and sharing lifecycle (KASL-II) model for aiding the knowledge sharing process by showing the stages of translating an organization's mission and goals into objectives, and how decisions and actions operate for materialising these objective [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SUMMARY The impact of culture on knowledge management in international teams is an important topic which is still not well understood. We contribute to the discussion by presenting two case studies of small software teams involved in distributed software development. In doing so, we illustrate how cultural and social issues influence the way knowledge exchange is performed by analyzing four knowledge sharing practices: status meetings and maintaining awareness, the collaborative use of shared artifacts and repositories, spending time at the other site and human 'bridges' that mediate between people and cultures. Our findings suggest that organizational culture is permanently re-negotiated and adjusted to fit the distributed collaboration, as the teams learn how to deal with each other. Socialization plays a significant role in this learning process, and people are more likely to draw on national stereotypes when breakdowns occur. The influences of national culture and site-specific organizational culture are subtle and not easy to separate from other factors. Based on our experience, we argue that in order to achieve an accurate understanding of knowledge sharing practices in globally distributed software teams, these need to be studied in context, longitudinally, and from both the onshore and offshore perspectives. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]