DRE-specific Wikis for Distributed Requirements Engineering: A Review

Abstract

Wikis, as typical well-known knowledge management tools that support collaborative work, are adopted by more and more practitioners and researchers as the basis to develop Distributed Requirements Engineering (DRE) tools. Thus, many wikis which are enhanced specially for supporting various activities in Distributed Requirements Engineering (namely DRE-specific wikis) are developed. The main goal of this study is to discover all the available DRE-specific wikis, gain an insight into how and to what degree current DRE-specific wikis can support the DRE activities, and identify the future research directions. We adopt the methodology of systematic literature review to find DRE-specific wikis, analyze the features embodied in them, identify DRE activities supported by them, and cluster the users' feedbacks from their literatures. The results show that 1) distributed requirements elicitation is the most popular DRE activity supported by current DRE-specific wikis, 2) enhanced features are mainly designed for this phase, 3) the well recognized advantage for using DRE-specific wikis is that they can facilitate the collaborative work, and the disadvantages mainly lie in the organization of the content and the usability. Based on the findings of this review, the possible future research directions of DRE-specific wikis have been pointed out, especially in distributed requirements elicitation, negotiation, validation, and management. The importance of cross-over studies and empirical research are both emphasized at the end of the paper.