Camilo FitzgeraldUCL Computer Science

5th February, 2008

Wiki-Based Conflict Management in RE: A PhD Topic Proposal

• Review of the paper: “Wiki-Based Stakeholder Participation in Requirements Engineering”1.

• Discussion of possible project ideas.• Next Steps.

Overview

• Argument for using Wikis as a tool for collaborative elicitation and evolution of requirements:

– Page histories provide a platform for requirements tracability

– Page linking reduces redundancy– Evolutionary and flexible mind-set of Wikis tie

into that of the requirements engineering process– Easy of training and use

Wiki-Based Stakeholder Participation in Requirements

Engineering

• Their adapted Wiki; SOP (Software Organization Platform)2:

Wiki-Based Stakeholder Participation in Requirements

Engineering

– Template for pages adapted from Volare and ReadySET.

– A set of rules are defined (eg. when to ‘finalize a requirement’), which are in themselves subject to evolutionary change.

• RE specific adaptations in SOP:– Versioning is possible across several pages.– Export of the Wiki into a self contained

OpenOffice document.– Meta-Data and relational semantics can be

attached to pages.– Support for multi-page reclassification.– Links are generated according to the

document template.

Wiki-Based Stakeholder Participation in Requirements

Engineering

• Support for conflicts management:– They have “No direct means to handle

conflicts”.– ‘Edit Wars’ usually suggest a conflict.– A drop in activity on a page may suggest a

user has silently withdrawn from a conflict.– Conflicts may be tagged and made the

subject of overviews and further discussions.

Wiki-Based Stakeholder Participation in Requirements

Engineering

• Next stages for SOP:– Allow users to work offline.– Compare the quality of requirements

documents produced by SOP against those produced by other methods.

– Identify inconsistencies in the requirements documents, e.g. An actor not used in any requirements could be located using an “orphaned pages” check.

Wiki-Based Stakeholder Participation in Requirements

Engineering

• Ideas:– Use the wiki to spot and manage conflicts

effectively: “Wiki-Based Conflict Management in RE: A Collaborative Approach”.

– Re-apply a known conflict management method over a wiki (eg. KAOS, viewpoints, or win-win)..

– Assist stakeholders with the merge requirements specifications.

Ideas and Discussions

• Ideas:– Open Source projects might especially benefit

from having their mailing lists and issue trackers migrated to the wiki and tracked alongside the requirements.

– Versioned source code could be linked to the requirements on the wiki. (Work already done on editing source code via wiki3).

– Possibilities to include RSS feeds, Blogs, Surveys and Polls.

– Interesting data and trends could be exposed via the data mining facilities available on wikis.

Ideas and Discussions

• Ideas:– ‘The International Symposium on Wikis’4 has

more literature on wikis that might be able applicable to the requirements conflict management setting (“Authorial Leadership in Wikipedia”, for example).

– The symposium might be a place to get an early paper published. (Next one is in Sept 2008, call for papers soon…).

Ideas and Discussions

• Concerns:– Is there sufficient novelty for a PhD Thesis? Is

this just the creation of an internet based tool? – Wikis seem like a fashionable topic: Might

there be a danger of someone doing something very similar.

– If I were to follow up on work done on SOP I would need to communicate/collaborate with an institute in Germany.

Ideas and Discussions

• If ideas are at all viable:– Play with the SOP templates.– Get in contact with the authors of the paper and

ask them exactly where they are researching into at the moment (and mention my plans to them).

– Look over the proceedings for the Symposium on Wikis for further insight into the current state of the art with wikis.

Next Steps

1 Wiki-Based Stakeholder Participation In Requirements Engineering

2 http://www.sop-world.org/index.php/Hauptseite

3 Xiao, W., C. Chi, et al. (2007). "On-line collaborative software development via wiki." International Symposium on Wikis .

4 http://www.wikisym.org/index.php

References

University College LondonDept. of Computer Science, MPEBLondon WC1E 6BTOffice: 7.08Tel: +44 (0)20 7679 3699 (Direct Dial)Fax: +44 (0)20 7387 1397Email: C.Fitzgerald (at) cs.ucl.ac.ukWeb: http://www.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/C.Fitzgerald/

Supervisors: Emmanuel Letier & Anthony

Finkelstein

Contact Information

Camilo Fitzgerald