Big knowlegde is required to build a software. We all know that, but in some IT projects amount of knowledge and information required to do even simple tasks is so huge that cause low productivity, low quality and people dissatisfaction. The relation is like that:

I think it’s quite obvious. The more knowledge and information you need to complete tasks, the more time you spend searching and learning from many places and from many people. More time means less productivity. The more time you look for information, the more overloaded you are and, consequently, dissatisfied. More time for gathering knowledge means less time and energy for execution of tasks with high-quality.

There are more negative consequences: long implementation time of new functionalities, many problems, expensive bug fixing, refactoring and maintenance, unstable environments, exceeded deadlines …. All this cost a lot of money and cause a bad working atmosphere.

Ok, we know a lot of information / knowledge is a “bad thing”. But where is it coming from?

Nowadays people building the software need to know many aspects. If you take developers as an example they need to know programming languages, conventions in project, many different technologies, technical solutions, processes and procedures, development environments and their configuaration, infrastructure, domain/business requirements and much much more. Do you feel how much knowledge is required to do even simple task? Yes, a large amount. In IT projects with many business requirements, complex infrastructure, many integrations with external systems etc. the amount of knowledge is terrifyingly enormous.

You may naively think that people / developers will know everything after a few months. It is impossible. The amount of knowledge is irrationally large, and the brain is limited – it doesn’t remember every detail. In addition, the project is constantly evolving, many new requirements, changes in processes and technologies etc., which may make today’s knowledge useless in a month’s time.