Howard G. Cunningham is an American computer programmer who developed the first wiki and was a co-author of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. A pioneer in both design patterns and extreme programming, he started coding the WikiWikiWeb in 1994, and installed it on c2.com on March 25, 1995, as an add-on to the Portland Pattern Repository. He co-authored a book about wikis, entitled The Wiki Way, and invented the Framework for Integrated Test.

A wiki is a form of online hypertext publication that is collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience directly through a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the public or limited to use within an organization for maintaining its internal knowledge base.