The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention

Chapter 19. Knowledge Management and Communication

Both project complexity and specialization (decomposing the project or team members into functional areas) make knowing all pertinent aspects of a project more difficult: you can’t know everything. As teams grow larger or become geographically separated, it becomes more difficult for members to communicate with one another. This difficulty occurs when functional teams are separated, and it becomes even more noticeable in large teams or at multiple sites.

Similarly, complexity increases the importance of documentation because it becomes more likely that no one person can understand all the details of the entire product. Naturally, localized expertise develops, which in turn increases the need ...