The wonderful world of wiki benefits students and instructors

In order to educate students on the software engineering process, the University of Alabama in Huntsville requires computer engineering students to work as a group on a mock project. Along with the final source code, the group is expected to turn in all relevant requirements, design, and test documents along with their revision histories, tracked by the method of our choice. Based on experience with past classes, we had found that managing a single report across a group without a master repository involves many different versions being moved around via e-mail messages, thumb drives, and project notebooks. Combining this disorganization with limited meeting time outside of class and the chances of easily completing this heavily documented project began to look slim. We needed a better solution. Our answer was a wiki combined with software configuration management (SCM) and source browsing tools. This article not only explains the advantages of using our solution but also shows how to set up our development platform from scratch.