WikiDev 2.0
From SSRG Annoki
WikiDev 2.0: Supporting Software Teams
People Involved
Marios Eleytherios Fokaefs Ken Bauer Diego Serrano Brendan Tansey Veselin Ganev
People work in teams. Effective collaboration is the cornerstone of any successful team initiative. Computer-mediated collaboration has been a subject of intense study for a long time, but as the scale of the collaborating teams increases, traditional systems become ineffective. The problem of designing tool support for effectively supporting good collaboration is, therefore, becoming increasingly important.
To better motivate the methodology proposed in this project, let us place it in the context of distributed software team collaboration. Designers create models of a proposed system, developers implement the designs, testers validate the implementation. Not all of these team members use a single IDE for all their tasks, so the relations between a module (i.e., class, method, procedure, variable, attribute, etc) and the rest of the system may end up being separately recorded in many separate repositories. The design environment captures the intended dependencies between the major entities in the envisioned system; the implementation environment records the actual is-a, contains, provides and uses relations among the implemented entities, which are likely a superset of the designed ones; in the testing environment, the specified test suites capture the exercised system features. In addition, the version-control system captures the evolutionary relationships among these artifacts, and the ticket-tracking system records – to some degree – the rationale for some of the evolution. In parallel, each of these systems likely captures the identities of the team members who are involved in authoring or editing the recorded artifacts.
The WikiDev 2.0 tool adopts a wiki-based architecture for integrating information feeds from a variety of tools that software-team members use for design, development and communication. See a demo at WikiDev_Video.
Video Manuals of WikiDev2.0 and WikiDev3D (circa May 2010) can be found at WikiDev2.0_Video and WikiDev3D_Video correspondingly.