I have heard and read a lot of hype about getting a wiki setup for our team. I have been told it is great for documentation of requirements, test. If we set it up we would use it for everything... blah blah blah. But why do we need it? We currently half heartedly check in documents to our source control repository. We also put some requirements and comments into our issue tracking system. We also have a share on a file server. We are great at sending emails to our teams distribution list.. Do we need a wiki when we have all of this other stuff?
What kind of content do we have?
· Support Information - We have been good at checking in documents that mater into our version control system. These are maintenance and checklist type documents. We are still lacking some critical information which is not documented and currently only exists in some of our team members heads.
· Feature & System designs - We have been good at capturing the results of our whiteboard design sessions, so once that whiteboard is erased, we still have the critical points that we need to remember as we are going through our implementation. I have a terrible memory and it is really helpful to capture the details of these design sessions so that I do not make a critical mistake because I have not considered all of the ideas that came out of these sessions. This information is critical to save. It helps when parts of features are tabled and it is a good idea to review this information when the request makes it back into the work queue, because the feature has usually changed a little and a little comparison of the old design and the new design is a great sanity check.
Lets try it out.
I put up a wiki and members of the team started putting content in it. This was a trial run. We have some content that needs a home. I must say I gave it a fair shake and members of the team did as well. But, we opted for something better. The fact that wikis bring another document formatting syntax to document editing is ridiculous. I want to get content for our team to share on our private network as easily and as fast as possible. We are a business and some of our content is going to come from office documents and formats which can easily translate into a wiki format. For our case a wiki seems like a tool that is not ready for business use. I can see that it makes sense for a public domain project but I would say the using one for our team would just be another point of frustration in the daily lives of our team members.
The funny thing is that a lot of wiki supporters will say, but it is so easy, and it is easier then html. My argument to that is we don’t write our documents in html, I use html for the solutions we deliver for our business but if I need to document something I document it in the tool that lets be do it the quickest. That could be excel, word, viso, power point, or notepad. To me content is king and it seems to me that using a wiki for our team would be using a wiki for the sake of being part of the club. I must say I would rather do what helps me get my just done the most efficiently and in this case it is not a wiki. I am considering some other options for now but I would rather not subject my team to tools that complicates our daily life, we are trying to reduce complexity rather then add to it. We still need to find a solution but the editing syntax and fact that the wikis we looked at do not allow us to easily consume content from our existing sources are just to high of a barrier for us to Go Wiki.