Software development teams depend on the constant and varied use of technological tools that contribute to the fluidity of development activities. The communication channels provided by these tools contribute to the participatory culture of software development, where requirements include getting involved, learning and co-producing the code. However, the choice of channels to support development is still an open question in the scientific community. Through an investigation of closed remote software teams from a large public educational institution in Brazil during the COVID-19 Pandemic, we identified their preferred communication channels and analyzed them to learn how to improve collaboration. We also drew some comparison with social developers and took a look at the challenges that these channels impose and solutions adopted to mitigate these problems.

Competency Management Systems are used to facilitate individual competencies management, both in companies and academia. Most systems use the term “competency management” based only on the technical skills of individuals. This way, the manager ends up not being sure of the accuracy of the technical skills of individuals, forming low-performance and poorly collaborative groups. This paper presents an open source web tool aimed at forming highly collaborative groups. The main contribution of this research is the innovative use of the Forgotten Curve concept and modeling for collaborative based grouping to support the design of work teams.

Collaboration is an important process for combining the potential and knowledge of experts in organizations. To support the transfer of knowledge, we highlight the role of teams in disseminating knowledge and in preparing new specialists. After all, the absence of a strategy to avoid the loss of a specialist's knowledge, by retirement or unexpected departure, may correspond to a reduction of competitive advantage for the organization. Therefore, this work proposes providing managers with mechanisms that facilitate the formation of new specialists through a behavioral approach. For this, collaborative observations, based on the use of the eMOC tool - Mapping Expert Behavior Through Observation, can intensify collaboration productivity, coordinate activities and improve interaction among group members. The result of the work consists in presenting a set of cognitive barriers and thus promoting the acceleration of the transfer of knowledge, generating profit and value for the organizations.

Knowledge transfer in organizations is a decisive advantage in the competitive market. When it is done effectively, it prevents companies from losing relevant information when experts leave or are disconnected for any reason. Considering that beliefs and collaboration are important to support the knowledge transfer process, this paper investigates the main cognitive barriers and beliefs that may prevent knowledge transfer in organizational environments. This work maps the knowledge transfer processes found in organizations in order to elicit the barriers faced by experts as well as their beliefs, and how they affect the group during complex decision activities. These barriers are part of the Conceptual Framework for Identifying Barriers of Knowledge Transfer between Experts (KTAe).

Experts apply their intuition in different activities within organizations (e.g. decision making, impact projection). Thus, when an expert leaves the organization, it loses the expert's intuition as well as his/her expertise. In this context, the organization spends resources (e.g. time, money) to replace and train a new expert. We propose to use a team instead of an individual as a way to accelerate the process of training and replacing the expert. For the team to be able to perform actions using a rationale similar to the individual expert's, a process to develop intuition in a group is proposed. The application of the process in a real scenario provides initial evidences about its viability.

Dynamic domains involve complex decisions that must be made by experts. In these domains, the impacts of decisions lead to unpredictable results. An unexpected need for impact mitigation involves a great deal of material resources and expert cognitive capacity; after a decision is made, impact mitigation requires costly expert effort. To address this problem, this paper proposes the characterization of projections for the impacts of decisions in the early stages of decision management. A complex decision impact (CDI) metamodel is put forward that forms the basis of a support system to orient decision makers in the achievement of decision impacts. This proposal was evaluated by experts in the field of dynamic domains, and this evaluation generated evidence confirming the feasibility of CDI and the adherence of the proposed metamodel regarding the actions taken in practice by decision makers in complex domains.

Organizations are becoming increasingly complex, interconnected, dynamic and horizontal. In this scenario, expertise transfer is a complex process, but can lead the organization to gain competitive advantage, save money, and reduce the impact of losing expertise. Organizations are investigating not only expertise transfer techniques, but also how to accelerate transfer. We explore an approach that splits expertise of an individual and transfers it to a collaborative team. We are particularly interested in exploring the feasibility of the approach and if it actually accelerates the transfer. Besides, we believe the approach of using teams reduces the impact of losing expertise in the organization. We present some results of a systematic review on knowledge transfer and a survey of organizational practices on knowledge transfer.

Collaboration is an important concept for workgroups involved in agile development processes. However, enhancing collaboration within those groups is not an easy task. This research aims to create a Collaboration Observation Framework (COF) suitable for workgroups that practice agile software development fundamentals. To this end, observations were conducted in agile development workgroups to validate and identify criteria for the collaboration evaluation. In this paper, COF is presented, and its applicability is discussed in the representatives' workgroup view.