Master´s Thesis Uliana Bakhtina

Creating Software Architecture Documentation for MediaWiki Software

Context

The Wikipedia is a free Internet encyclopedia that provides users all over the world with multilingual knowledge base. It was initially launched in 2001 and now it is the seventh-most popular website on the Internet. The software that powers Wikipedia is called MediaWiki, it was introduced in 2002 and since then rewritten two times. MediaWiki has been constantly developed further to improve its performance and functionality. It was done by an active volunteer community and a small group of paid programmers who made this open-source project grow tremendously. [1]

Motivation and research questions

The architecture of MediaWiki has been often determined by initiatives and requests from the community and evolved significantly over time. The current software architecture is only scarcely documented which leads to an interesting opportunity of studying and describing it. The purpose of this thesis is to identify the needs of stakeholders for the documentation of MediaWiki’s architecture and to perform this documentation. The following research questions will be answered in this thesis:

• Who are the stakeholders for software architecture documentation of MediaWiki? What are their needs?
• What are the problems/deficiencies in available documentation?
• What are the steps to be taken to understand the existing software? What is the methodology? Are there established industry practices?
• What are the steps to be taken to produce the documentation? What kind of models to use? What kind of tools?
• After the documentation is performed: Did the produced documentation meet the requirements and could it bring added value to the stakeholders? 

Work plan

The initial work plan is represented in the following Gantt diagram. Detailed steps of each activity are provided below.

References

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Wikipedia