Wiki for Development

I'm always excited to start a new development effort. There's always so much to learn about your new users, their domain, and the problems they're experiencing. At this stage, ideas to help solve these user problems are plentiful and the possibilities seem endless. The hard part is, what to do with all the ideas you can't fit into your first release? Often these get left on a white board, buried in an email, or forgotten in a Word document.

My team had this exact problem a while back. We started using a wiki to track feature ideas. It was easy to update and enhance this list, eventually slotting these features into planned releases. The wiki became "The Place" to document design decisions, track progress, and even hold our user documentation (which we exported later and included with the release). It became a very valuable development resource.

A Wiki is a great tool for teams to keep all your ideas and development artifacts in a central, easily accessible location with low overhead. This technology was such a good fit for our organization, it's now used for all our development efforts.

Why wikis work for development

  1. They are quick. It is easy for users to update, search, and organize content. Because information can be added so quickly, it does not require a large time investment

  2. They are accessible. Anyone with a connection to your intranet can access or update the wiki. You can also create a public wiki for your product. This could provide a valuable resource for your users to post tips and provide their own "wish list" of features. Helping to create your own community, is a great way to foster brand loyalty (especially when they realize you are listening).

  3. They are cheap. Many implementations are available free of charge. We use MoinMoin which is also the wiki used by many Apache projects.

Did you know?

Wiki is the Hawaiian word for quick and is very appropriate for this technology.

Discussion

What has you wiki experience been like? Does your development team use a wiki or some alternative?

More Info

Wiki Definition (Wikipedia)

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