Abstract
The movement towards agility is one of the most significant changes in industrial software engineering over the past decade. In the practice of agile methodologies, there are different types of knowledge that is created, communicated, and consumed. For the benefit of the stakeholders involved, there is a pressing need to manage this knowledge, both during development and beyond deployment of a software system. This chapter proposes a framework comprising related conceptual models as means for understanding the use of Wiki for managing knowledge in agile software development. In doing so, Wiki is considered beyond that of a technology or a tool, as a facilitator of knowledge, and placed in a larger context of the Social Web environment. For the sake of practicality, a number of illustrative examples are given, and implications of deploying a Wiki are highlighted.
TopBackground
This section provides relevant background, and previous work relating agile software development, knowledge management, and Wiki.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Agile Methodology: A software development methodology based on the Agile Manifesto.
Use Case: A sequence of actions performed by a system, which yields an observable result of value to an actor of that system.
Artifact: A document or a model produced during software development.
Web Engineering: A discipline concerned with the establishment and use of sound scientific, engineering and management principles and disciplined and systematic approaches to the successful development, deployment, and maintenance of ‘high-quality’ Web Applications.
Model: A simplification, with respect to some goal, of a thing.
Wiki: A Web application developed cooperatively by a community of users, allowing any user to add, delete, or modify information.
Social Web: The perceived evolution of the Web in a direction that is driven by ‘collective intelligence,’ realized by information technology, and characterized by user participation, openness, and network effects.
Software Engineering: The application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software; that is, the application of engineering to software.
User Story: A high-level requirement statement that contains minimally sufficient information to produce a reasonable estimate of the effort to implement it.
User Experience: A person’s perception and responses that result from the use and/or anticipated use of a product or service.