• Software the Wiki Way Panel — Planned for WikiSym 2008.

Authors

• Alain Désilets
• Marc Laporte

The Wiki Way has profoundly affected the landscape content ("think User Generated Content")

But what about software development?

Abstract

Although Open Source has often been touted as being highly collaborative, most of them are being carried out by small groups of tightly knit core programmers. In contrast, wiki sites such as Wikipedia are created by tens of thouasands of loosely knit users. In this Case Study, we look at the TikiWiki project and show how it embodies some of those wiki principles for the practice of software development. We show how simple approaches were used to:

• Lower barriers to participation
• etc..

We discuss some of the advantages and disadvantages of this "wiki" way of developping software.

The TikiWiki project

The Software Development Practices at Tiki

What are they?

One that I am seeing emerge is:

• Automated Testing done by end users

Advantages and Disadvantages

Advantages

• get lots of code working and fast
• get your users and developers to mix

Disadvantages

• code is a mess
• long release cycles