A Survey of RE-specific Wikis for Distributed Requirements Engineering Han Lai 1,2 , Rong Peng 1,* , Dong Sun 1 , Fei Shao 1 , Yousong Liu 1 1 State Key Lab. of Software Engineering, Wuhan University Wuhan, China 2 Chongqing Key Lab. of Electronic Commerce & Supply Chain System, Chongqing Technology and Business University Chongqing, China e-mail: {laihan, rongpeng, sundong, shaofei, liuyous}@whu.edu.cn Abstract— Wiki, as one of the Web 2.0 technology, has received considerable interest due to its capability to support collaboratively online contents’ creation in a flexible and simple manner. Lots of researchers and practitioners committed themselves to enhancing wiki’s capability to support Requirements Engineering (RE). The main goal of this study is to discover all the available tools that use the wiki way or extend the wiki technology to support RE (called as RE- specific wikis), how these RE-specific wikis have been applied, and identify future research directions. We performed a survey through a thorough search for literature and tools that answer our research questions. After data synthesis, we found 12 available RE-specific wikis. And then, we drew out their features, evaluated their RE adaptability. Based on the above findings, we discussed future research directions on how to promote RE-specific wikis to support the collaborative requirements activities from representation, agreement and specification dimensions. Keywords- collaborative requirements activity; survey; RE- specific wikis I. INTRODUCTION As it is well known, global software development (GSD) is now a popular development paradigm adopted by many software development communities [1]. However, globalization poses two main challenges to Requirements Engineering (RE) research community [2, 3]. The first one is that new methods should be proposed to narrow communication gaps caused by distance between the users and the development teams; and the second one is that effective techniques should be promoted to facilitate and manage distributed requirements elicitation, negotiation, and documentation. Wikis, as websites which are collaboratively created by multiple users with a web browser [4], can not only allow users to contribute but also to modify and update content. They are basically made up of two components: the wiki technology and the wiki way which represents the social norms or principles enabled by the technology. Many efforts have been dedicated to adopting and extending wikis to improve their productivity, collaboration and innovation in both efficient and cost effective manners in many different domains, such as research and scientific collaboration [5] and education [6], etc. In the area of RE, [11] [32] point out that the generic wikis’ features, such as unrestricted access, collaborative editing, linking, versioning and open source, etc., have both strengthens and weaknesses for Distributed Requirements Engineering (DRE). In order to make best usage of the advantages and bypass the disadvantages, many enterprises and research communities have proposed various enhanced solutions based on them and developed many RE-specific wiki tools to support various activities in entire RE process, for example, SmartWiki [7], SoftWiki [8], and WikiWinWin [9], etc. This paper presents a survey of RE-specific wikis, namely the available tools which use the wiki way or extend the wiki technology to support RE. The aim is to discover how these RE-specific wikis have been applied in RE, and identify future research directions about how to promote RE- specific wikis to support DRE. The rest of the paper is organized as follows: Section II presents the related work. Section III describes the method used in this survey. Section IV presents the survey results and the discussion. Conclusion and future work are presented in Section V. II. RELATED WORK Lykourentzou et al. [10] provided a brief introduction of the main features of wikis and discussed the development status of wikis’ applications in various domains, such as organizational process and knowledge codification, information systems development and maintenance, etc. Although it gave out the objectives, advantages and concerns of applying wikis to RE, but it didn’t involve the analysis of the efforts having been paid in developing RE-specific wikis and their supported RE-specific features. Moreover, many existed RE-specific wikis are not included in [10]. Hoenderboom and Liang [11] found out the features provided by semantic wikis which were useful for the activities of RE, such as reasoning support, typing of annotation and enhanced navigation, etc. It outlined the RE activities which were covered by SOPWiki, WikiReq and SoftWiki. However, with many new RE-specific wiki tools arising, the evaluation should be expanded and the trends should be identified. There are several RE-specific wiki tools which were analyzed and compared as related works in [12-14], but the analysis and comparison are not dedicated since they are not the focuses of the studies. 2012 Eighth International Conference on Semantics, Knowledge and Grids 978-0-7695-4794-7/12 $26.00 © 2012 IEEE DOI 10.1109/SKG.2012.11 47