Interdisciplinary collaboration through wikis in software development

Abstract

The success of a software development project often requires collaboration among various disciplines because, in general, individual members from a single discipline do not have all of the information, knowledge, and expertise needed to produce successful software. Interdisciplinary collaboration has created challenges in software development due to the difficulty in communicating and coordinating across disciplines. The use of wikis seems to be growing rapidly as groups and organizations are turning to the use of wikis to solve these challenges. Although wikis have been claimed to support collaboration and information sharing, the backing for this claim has not been rigorously assessed. In this paper, I describe an exploratory study of the use of wikis for information sharing in two web application development teams. The study results will help us understand how wikis are used and how they may enable successful interdisciplinary collaboration in software development.