Knowledge management for inclusive system evolution

When systems evolve in today’s complex, connected, and heterogeneous IT landscapes, waves of change ripple in every direction. Sometimes a change mandates other changes elsewhere, very often it is needed and opportune to check that a change indeed has no effects, or maybe only the announced effects, on other portions of the connected landscape, and impacts are often assessable only or also by expert professionals distinct from IT professionals. In this paper, we discuss the state of affairs with the current practice of software design, and examine it from the point of view of the adequacy of knowledge management and change enactment in a co-creation environment, as it is predicated and practiced by modern agile and lean IT development approaches, and in software ecosystems. True and functioning inclusion of non-IT stakeholders on equal terms, in our opinion, hinges on adequate, i.e., accessible and understandable, representation and management of knowledge about the system under development along the entire toolchain of design, development, and maintenance.