Weaki - A weakly-typed wiki for incremental software knowledge acquisition

Abstract

Software development can be seen as the final stage in a process of knowledge acquisition, during which the acquired knowledge accumulates and evolves towards a source code that fulfills a set of conditions previously defined by the stakeholders. The knowledge acquired this way is stored in the form of software artifacts which have two different aspects: structure and content, that are very difficult to change separately from each other. To manage the acquired knowledge and the complexity of the acquisition process there are methods, practices and tools that are commonly used to facilitate the acquisition and processing of knowledge. Among these tools, one of the most popular are the wikis. Wikis provide a good platform to manage knowledge while also supporting collaborative work. However beyond what wikis already provide, it would be useful if they had other aspects such as the recognition of knowledge structures and the support for its evolutionary behaviour. The main goal of this work is to develop an extension to an existing wiki, by adding the functionalities to support structure recognition and type inference, with the goal of aiding in the development of software documentation artifacts, allowing for a gradual increase in the formalization of its structure and content. The usefulness of the wiki extension was validated through and empirical experience with students.