Tacit knowledge

Q: How deeply does Think Like a Software Engineering Manager cover tacit knowledge?

Explains consequences and practical responses through delegation, documentation, and code-review scenarios.

As explained in Think Like a Software Engineering Manager

Undocumented knowledge held by a limited group or individual rather than recorded in accessible organizational documentation.

Tacit knowledge is expertise held by one person or a small group that has not been recorded in accessible documentation. When a team depends on one person to fill knowledge gaps, work can slow and the team may struggle to scale. section 5.1.2

Reduce reliance on undocumented expertise by spreading knowledge through the team:

Document recurring problems and their resolutions so teammates can use them during on-call work and handovers. section 10.1.5
Use code reviews to bring more people into decisions and share knowledge across the team. section 12.2.1
Delegate work to give others opportunities to build expertise instead of becoming the sole knowledge bearer. section 5.1.2

Legacy services

A team maintaining two critical legacy services relied on tribal knowledge to make short-term fixes when production problems arose. Documentation, code-quality tools, and reviews helped the team share expertise and improve maintainability. section 12.2.1

How Think Like a Software Engineering Manager covers it

Cover of Think Like a Software Engineering Manager

liveBook manning.com

Read Think Like a Software Engineering Manager on liveBook Get the book at manning.com

Related concepts

specificationcontrasts with · A specification is a formal or informal description of the required or intended behavior, properties, interfaces, or constraints of a system or component.
documentationaddressed by · Documentation is recorded explanatory, instructional, or reference information that describes a subject, system, or process to support its understanding, use, or maintenance.
governancecontrasts with · Governance is the system of policies, roles, decision rights, processes, controls, and oversight through which an organization, system, or activity is directed and held accountable.
dependency graphaddressed by · A dependency graph is a graph whose nodes represent entities and whose edges represent dependency relationships among them.
understandingproduces · Understanding is the capacity to interpret information and extract meaningful structure, meaning, or relationships from it.

This explainer was generated by Manning's knowledge graph from the text of Think Like a Software Engineering Manager. The section links point to the parts of the book it draws on.