System specification in a wiki

I have been writing system and/or application specification for a decade now with very various results. In most cases they tend to be something that all clients always needs and that we always have as one of the deliverables in the project. I also know that not even 25% of my application specs ever come to use. Either because they are too brief, making them useless for a developer, or too advanced making them impossible to keep updated.

Depending on the abstraction level of a system specification cross-references are more or less used. If I for example describes the application with the user in center I will have at least one chapter per section/screen/mode the user can end up in. Every such section will then refer to functions and features that also are on other screens. This is not too easy to accomplish when sitting in word or visio but the other week I decided to try writing the system spec in a wiki.

Everyone was delighted, even the project manager. We wrote the system spec in a wiki and planned to deliver the whole notes database, yes I used a notes based wiki, the dominoWIKI at openNTF.

But then suddenly someone came around and said:

- Sounds like double work. Never underestimate the single paper, clients wants the spec in a printable format.

I must admit that this makes sense. So now I’m thinking of a way to organize the various pages on a wiki for printing. At the moment I think an index or “paper version” page would be the start, and everything that this “paper version” page links to will be printed in the same order as the links appears.

Anyway, this seems like a new field, no one has ever delivered the system/app spec in a WIKI format before. What’s your opinion?