Our test team recently woke up to a big problem with managing knowledge within the team. We have a lot of new starters, and with that comes a lot of questions. Our process documentation was good, but spread out over an Intranet site, on a shared disk, and–worst of all–some of it stored only in personal email Inboxes.

As an attempted solution to this problem, I’ve installed a wiki for our team to use as a knowledge base. It’s an ideal solution to a difficult problem. It can be viewed as a “how do I…” type resource, something that is definitely needed within our team.

The Problem
Here’s a run-down of the problems we were seeing.

• Test is where all new graduates start in our company: I’m one of them. Three to five graduates are hired each year and spend their first year in the Test incubator before moving into Development. The permanent test team is only six in number, including the test manager, so this basically boils down to a high staff turnover.
• The applications we use on a day-to-day basis are not easy to use. I’m pointing at you, Oracle. New starts have a hard time getting to grasp with that and WebSphere, WebLogic, and DB2, not to mention our own enterprise products. This is amplified by the fact that most graduates have little or no experience in the enterprise.
• Disparate documentation. I always had problems knowing where to look for a particular document. Is it on the Intranet? Probably not. Is it on the Test Team share? Probably - but which folder? And so the hunt begins. And it usually ends by going over to a senior test analyst and asking “how do I…?”. Which brings me on to…
• Experienced staff spend too much time answering questions from new starts. I’ve been an employee here for 9 months now and I’m still asking questions all the time. Thankfully the senior analysts here don’t mind helping out, but it’s a serious drain on their time. They’ll have to repeat this whole process when the new grads start in September.

The Solution
The problem is clear: the documentation is there, but there’s no order to it. Bringing order to documentation is hard; that’s why a wiki is perfectly suited to the task. Wikis allow structure to grow naturally; it imposes nothing and brings one of the the key benefits of the World Wide Web to your documentation.

Since we already use Ruby extensively here, I set up Ruby-based Instiki–which, incidentally, took all of about five minutes–and immediately started writing. Some of it is simply links to documents elsewhere, other stuff is little snippets that I’ve written to answer questions that I know are asked often.

The best thing is–it’s already growing fast and everybody here is adding to it. Time will tell if our new wiki solves the problem.