RESUMEN

The authors present and contrast the processes put in place by four companies to achieve systematic reuse. The companies have different sizes, business contexts, and development approaches. However, all achieved their reuse goals, even though they made radically different choices on essential processes and technologies. This article discusses the key reasons for the different processes' success, including strong commitment from management, identifying and addressing the issues for change, and minimizing changes.

RESUMEN

The knowledge-intensive nature of current global software development efforts poses interesting challenges. Organizations must manage knowledge in all stages of software development efforts—from encapsulating design requirements to creating and testing programs, installation, and maintenance. Knowledge even extends to the improvement of organizational software development processes and practices. This article examines knowledge management practices in more than 50 software organizations over the last three years, describing the major findings in the context of knowledge management in software development efforts on a global scale.This article is part of a special issue on Global Software Development.