Using Wikis to manage use cases: Experience and outlook

A sound Requirements Engineering is one of the key practices for a successful software project. However, there is the risk that requirements documents degenerate to a write-only documentation that does not reflect the experiences about a system gained throughout a project. Furthermore, "classical", selfcontained requirements documentation templates do not reflect the interrelated nature of requirements. For example, a user description is referenced in various places in a requirements document. In this paper, we present how freely available Wikis support requirements engineering based on a textual use case approach, based on the following considerations: First, we believe that the agile nature of Wikis support the creation and change management of requirements. Second, as a hypertext system, they address the intertwined nature of requirements. Third, Wikis provide a low effort, easy to test approach to requirements engineering, since most of them Wikis are open source and serverbased.