As systems grow in complexity ( infrastructure in multiple languages, distributed design patterns), knowledge silos appear and, as a result, developers on your team grapple with code that is unfamiliar to them – whether this be while onboarding, debugging, or maintaining code. 

Knowledge sharing amongst engineering teams is fundamentally flawed; critical codebase knowledge often resides solely in the mind of an individual developer. And if knowledge is written down, code comments don’t paint the full picture, though they can be useful in some cases. Furthermore, internal documentation requires continuous effort to keep up-to-date and relevant.

In this talk, I will cover new ways to approach the management of intra-organizational engineering knowledge, while also addressing the paradox of neglect. Finally, I will offer practical solutions to effective knowledge democratization, which, in a way, is part of the software development lifecycle.

You will leave this talk with knowledge on:  

• Effects of knowledge silos on software organizations
• Common pitfalls in knowledge transferring
• Tools to effectively share knowledge across software teams
• How AI can be leveraged, and what its limitations are regarding knowledge about your code