Investigating knowledge management within software industry: a systematic literature review

Knowledge is the ground of the software industry. In order to acquire, create, and incorporate knowledge, the organizations embrace the Knowledge Management (KM). Thus, the goal of this paper is to identify methodological instruments used by researchers to investigate the knowledge management within the software industry. We analyze the status of the research presenting an overview of the methods used by the authors, the objectives established by them, and some relevant aspects to drive future work in KM area. Based on the systematic literature review method this study analyses articles about what instruments are used by researchers within software industry to knowledge management investigate from June 2006 to July 2016 on five electronic databases according to a pre-defined protocol. Inthisliterature review, we identified eight articles about instruments to knowledge management investigate within the software industry. Those articles have been reviewed according to a set of research questions. We observed that this research subject has not been a common practice in the last ten years and the tools to investigate knowledge management used were structured based on consolidated research methodological instruments, having some necessary adaptations done. The results demonstrated that knowledge management is fundamental to software industry since these organizations are knowledge intensives. However, none studies analyzed specific proposalsof the instruments to investigate KM within the software industry.