Using Wiki for Agile Software Development

Background

The genealogies of agility and Wiki are, perhaps unsurprisingly, not mutually exclusive. This section provides a brief glimpse into the history and evolution of both agility and Wiki, with an emphasis on the interplay, as necessary.

The origins of agility date back to the 1950s (Larman & Basili, 2003), although the underlying ideas, such as that of piecemeal growth and prototyping, became noticeable only after the rise of software engineering as a profession and large-scale commoditization of software. In the 1990s, a number of limitations of rigidity in approaches for the development of certain types of software systems were realized. The drive to cope with these limitations led to the inception of agility. The Agile Manifesto characterizes the term “agile” and provides a vision for agile software development. It constitutes the basis for a number of agile methodologies, the collection of which continues to evolve, including Crystal Clear, Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM), Extreme Programming (XP), Feature-Driven Development (FDD), Open Unified Process (OpenUP), and Scrum. According to periodic surveys conducted by IBM and VersionOne over the years, XP and Scrum are among the agile methodologies currently in common use. The agile methodologies have garnered support in national and international standards, such as the ISO/IEC/IEEE 26511 Standard, the ISO/IEC/IEEE 26515 Standard, and the ISO/IEC/IEEE 29148 Standard. An agile methodology is usually equipped with a process that outlines how the development of software should proceed over time. An agile process usually consists of time-boxed iterations. For those responsible for managing an organization, the selection of, or a transition to, an appropriate agile methodology is a crucial issue from the standpoint of strategic management (Moreira, 2013). However, addressing this crucial issue in detail is beyond the scope of this article.