Wikis, Blogs, and Discussion Forums

These techniques can apply to many types of projects. However, because they require participation from a number of stakeholders, these strategies are most effective for larger projects. Blogs and wikis should be used when developing software for sale.

People love to contribute. The success of wikis and Web logssee Wikipedia and the tens of thousands of blogs for evidence of their popularitydemon-strates that, given a chance and a forum, people are happy to spend a little time adding their opinions and facts to some public electronic forum. These contributions take many formsyou have probably used severalbut for the sake of brevity we shall refer to them all as wikis.

The basic idea of a wiki is that anyoneand the point is largely that any- one can do itcan make a post or edit or add to whatever has already been posted. Some forums keep their discussions in threaded form so you can see the discussion unfold; some allow contributors to overwrite or reorganize whatever they find. Additionally, anyone can add hypertext links to other useful sources of information or make any other kind of change.

Wikis rely on technology, but it is technology readily available to all. You can buy or download free hosting solutions to host your requirements wiki. If your organization will not give you the server space, then there are several publicly available sites. If you choose this route, check carefully before you post what could be sensitive commercial information in the public domain.

The Web is a bountiful source for requirements. Search for your domain of interest. You will likely uncover a lot of information on what other people have done in your domain and, if you are lucky, you will find information you can readily convert to requirements for your product.

In this technique, you seed the wiki with an outline of the proposed product and invite stakeholders to add their piece. Once someone posts an opinion on what the product should do, you will no doubt find others chipping in to support or refute the original posting. Others invariably have their say, and before long you have a substantial collection of information and opinions. Anyone can contribute to a wiki. That the contributor is not one of the stakeholders you identified is irrelevant. If a person has something to say, you want to hear it, and you want each of your contributors to see what the others are saying.

And it is free, or can be.

The Web is a bountiful source for requirements. Search for your domain of interest. You will likely uncover a lot of information on what other people have done in your domain and, if you are lucky, you will find information you can readily convert to requirements for your product. At the very least, you will find papers and articles providing valuable information about your domain. And, like wikis, searching the Web is free.