Role-based wiki for reuse of Off-the-Shelf Components

IT companies are confronted with a huge, growing Off-the-Shelf (OTS) marketplace containing incredibly large amount of diverse, partial, ephemeral, sometimes tacit and not always trustable information about OTS components. Our empirical studies illustrate that different users, such as OTS evaluator, OTS integrator, system tester, and system maintainer, need different information and knowledge about OTS components when facing different scenarios. Although a few companies are using mini-wikis internally to manage and share OTS related knowledge, knowledge sharing across companies is rare. Searching existing web portals or sites of OTS components is time consuming and often does not bring systematic knowledge. This position paper proposes role-based wikis to organize OTS components related knowledge in a systematic way. One motivation of constructing such a wiki is to provide necessary knowledge for different users to help them reduce risks. Another motivation is to provide a global centralized platform, so that OTS users can systematically share their knowledge across organizations.