WardCunningham/Smallest-Federated-Wiki — Issue #144: LIghtweight issue tracking with Smallest Federated Wiki
Author: kbigler
Created: 2012-03-01 01:32:51+00:00
State: open

My discovery of Smallest Federated Wiki coincided with a recently renewed wish for a way to have some accountable tracking within a small development company that is run in a very informal way due to the personalities involved. I saw the presentation of Smallest Federated Wiki as indicating an almost direct answer to the needs I'd been perceiving and the kind of solution I'd been wishing for. With minor tweaks (plug-ins, I hope) we could "use Smallest Federated Wiki for everything" and notably stop most current uses of email.

I imagine that a couple of new plugins might bridge the gap between what you have now and what we need to be productive given the both informal and diverse styles of this small company I'm involved with. But before getting into implementation I'd like to share an overview of the basic capabilities I envision and what these capabilities would replace. Then maybe you could suggest an approach.

Goal: to be able to create trackable items within narrative contexts. It is adequate for our needs to consider the trackable items to be of two types:

(1) issues (bugs, etc.)

(2) questions that one of us needs an answer for from another in our small group (usually only 2) in order to proceed with our work

We currently use email and an occasional "word file" and play it all very loose, and this is proving to be more dysfunctional as time passes in the context of changes this company is going through.

In our internal communication, I'd like to be able to talk about a scenario and in the midst of that scenario point out several things that are wrong and should be fixed. The accountable entities might simply be embedded internal links, but it might even be nice to have the full (probably brief) description be both typed in-line and appear in-line rather than opening the linked page for typing in ordinary use. Elsewhere there'd be a way to pull up a list of issues by keyword (e.g. project/milestone). It might be nice to be able to have automatic back-links to the narrative within which the issue was created.

Likewise I'd like to be able to type a narrative with embedded questions needing answers, and be able to expect that the reader therefore has some support for finding the things needing answers and a way to find them readily, 2 weeks and 1000 emails and one business trip later.

Secondarily, it is very good (and you already do this) that my narrative could be edited by my client into her own narrative, more useful for her to work with than the one I wrote, yet still contain the same embedded "imperatives".

Make sense? Do you agree that S-F-W is a match? [And how's S-F-W versus SFW as an abbreviation?]