What are some examples of how your company uses a wiki for development?

Question

Do you use a wiki in your company? Who uses it and what for. Do you share information between projects / teams / departments or not?

Answer 1

We use ours to store

• Coding Style docs
• Setup and Deployment procedures for web servers and sites
• Network diagrams (what are all the servers in Dev, Staging, QA and Production called etc.)
• Project docs (pdfs, visios, excel, docs, etc.) are stored in SVN. For the non-techies we have links to those docs in the wiki that point to an up-to-date share on my box. (tip: some wikis provide source control integration but ours doesn't)
• Installation and Setup procedures for development tools
• Howto's on things like using our bug tracking system, our unit testing philosophy
• When doing research on a topic I often capture the important information in a wiki page for others to learn from
• I've seen them used to keep seating charts in medium to large size organizations for the new people
• At my previous company all of the emergency contacts and procedures for handling a critical outage where available on the front page of the wiki
• The best part about a wiki is that it's searchable. Some wiki's support searching inside uploaded or linked docs as well.

If you setup a wiki and encourage or even require people to use it the amount of information that will accumulate can be amazing. It's definately worth the effort especially if you have someone in IT with some spare time on their hands to set it up.

Answer 2

Do you use a wiki in your company?

= We use it for the purpose of a Knowlede Based. Basically it is a wiki but many more functionalities intagrated.

Who uses it and what for

= Employees. Knowledge Sharing, Preparation of collaborative-documents, etc.

Do you share information between projects / teams / departments or not?

= Depends on the requirements. It is possible to set permissions between users.

Answer 3

We use a wiki, for documenting our systems. It's updated gradually as things update and evolve. It should go without saying that there's benefit in that, however whether you use a wiki or other methods is worth thinking about.

A wiki is great for collarborative editing. The information shouldn't go stale in theory, because as people use the systems they have the opportunity to keep it up to date.

However we have found in our organisation that people struggle a little with wiki markup. Especially tables. I think a solution that has wysiwyg editing would be better if you have non-highly-technical people editing it. Sharepoint springs to mind, but it's expensive.

Answer 4

I use a wiki as my virtual "story wall" for agile development. All of my stories are written and organized in the wiki. While my customers are reasonably local (we can have face-to-face meetings), they aren't co-located. To enable better customer interaction I've resorted to a wiki instead of a wall-based story tracking mechanism. It also works a little better for me due to the fact that I often have multiple, concurrent projects and limited wall space in my cube. In a larger team with more focused projects and more wall area, I'm not sure I'd make the same choice.

Answer 5

My company uses a wiki for project-planing but also for storing documentation and ideas.
I have found that a wiki is a great way to link the programmers in the company with the business-people.

When someone who are not on the programming-team comes up with an idea or finds a bug, it's a loot simpler to let that person document it in the wiki.

I think it's an important aspect for a small company like mine to easily synchronize the business-team with the development-team.
A wiki helps with that, since it gives the feeling of being a part of the development process, instead of having to ask the programmer directly about every little detail.

Answer 6

we have MediaWiki to store technical information that is not ready to be published in other formats - specification drafts, diagrams (via GraphViz extension), results of short investigations, etc.

I also think this question is a wiki too :)