Wiki-Based Stakeholder Participation in Requirements Engineering

TLDR

Requirements elicitation and documentation are complex and evolve with stakeholder involvement, requiring flexible platforms; wikis provide such flexibility for asynchronous collaboration. We investigate how to adapt wiki-based collaboration to support active stakeholder participation in requirements engineering. We propose a wiki-based RE document structure and discuss potential problems and solutions drawn from our experience.

Abstract

Requirements elicitation and documentation are complex activities. So, not only the requirements themselves but also the people involved and the means for managing the requirements will evolve during the project. For example, it might be necessary to add RE personnel, to document templates, or to change the requirements classification scheme. In summary, especially in participative RE, the underlying platform as well the RE approach must be flexible. As the well-known Wikipedia shows, wikis provide a flexible platform for asynchronous collaboration to create content in general. In this article, we investigate how to adapt this approach to support active stakeholder participation in RE. We include a document structure for wiki-based RE and discuss potential problems and solutions based on our experience