Semantic wiki for quality management in software development projects

Abstract. Quality Management has become a strategic issue for organisations and very valuable to produce quality software. However, Quality Management Systems (QMS) are not easy to implement and maintain. Our experience shows the benefits of developing a QMS by first formalising it using Semantic Web ontologies and then putting them into practice through a semantic wiki. The QMS ontology that has been developed captures the core concepts of a traditional QMS and combines them with concepts coming from the MPIu+a development process model, which is geared towards obtaining usable and accessible software products. Then, the ontology semantics is directly put into play by a semantics-aware tool, the Semantic MediaWiki. The developed QMS tool has been running for two years at the GRIHO research group, where it has been used to manage almost 50 software development projects taking into account quality management issues. It has been also externally audited by a quality certification organisation. Its users are very satisfied with their daily work with the tool, which manages all the documents created during project development and also allows them to collaborate thanks to wiki features.