Turnover-induced knowledge loss in practice

When contributors to a software project leave, the knowledge they hold may become lost, thus impacting code quality and team productivity. Although well-known strategies can be used to mitigate knowledge loss, these strategies have to be tailored to their target context to be effective. To help software development organizations mitigate turnover-induced knowledge loss, we sought to better understand the different contexts in which developers experience this knowledge loss, and the resulting implications. We conducted qualitative interviews with 27 professional developers and managers from three different companies that provide software products and services. Leveraging the experience of these practitioners, we contribute a framework for characterizing turnover-induced knowledge loss and descriptions of the implications of knowledge loss, synthesized into 20 observations. These observations about knowledge loss in practice are organized into four themes, validated by the participants, and discussed within the context of the research literature in software engineering.