Efficacy of Pair Programming in Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management has been one of the most robust and interesting subject of research in the recent years. Effective knowledge management is considered to play an increasingly important role in creating competitive advantage in organizations. The more the companies and organizations have come to realize that success is often determined by one’s ability to create, disseminate, and embody knowledge in products and services, the faster has been the growth of literature and research on this topic. This realization has led to an increased interest in examining different ways in which knowledge can be effectively created, identified, codified, disseminated, shared and retained in the field of academics, more specifically in the context of higher education setting. Agile software development is an iterative and incremental methodology, where solutions evolve from self- organizing, cross-functional teams. Pair programming is a type of agile software development technique, where two programmers work together with one computer for developing software. The basic intent of the study is to explore the possibilities of adopting pair programming as a pedagogical tool in higher educational setting. This paper highlights how the agile approach like pair programming initiates a culture change that is in line with the culture change needed for a KM initiative in a software organization.