Distributed Development Team

Aaron Feng — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 23:21:00 -0600

Currently on Shoechicken we have three team members. Each one of us lives in a different city. Not everyone is on the same time zone, and our schedule is slightly different. It can be difficult to gather everyone together to have a discussion around Shoechicken.

At first we tried to use instant messaging, it is very light weight, so we can type to each other whenever as long as we are online. However, most IM software is targeted for one-on-one chatting, and it does not save the history in a central location for later consumption. We eventually moved to Campfire, since it has everything we wanted and still kept it simple. It allows multiple people to chat at the same time and saves the transcripts. However, since everyone is on a different schedule, we still had a hard time getting people into Campfire around the same time.

We eventually went back to the old trusty email. I was really surprised email actually worked better for us. I was avoiding using email because I prefer real-time communication over delayed.

Part of the reason email worked well for us so far is because we are still in the very beginning of the project. Everyone tends to have lots of little questions about various parts of the system. It is hard to get across lots of unorganized information via chat style of communication. The screen tends to scroll fairly quickly, and the conversations are often lost. Especially when you have multiple people chatting at the same time.

In general I am not a big fan of delayed communication. I feel it divides up the team and often takes longer to get a response. But in this case, we are all working on Sheochicken as a side project, so some delay is not a problem.

"Distributed Development Team" by James Horsley

Tue, 06 Mar 2007 23:50:44 -0600

No disagreements from me on that one. Email seems to have turned out to be a great way for us to communicate. I think something that you hit on is that because you're not dropping ideas out as whole pieces, other people tend to interject in the chat scenario and the original train of thought gets lost. Can be very frustrating.

Obviously, the downside to that upside is that if you're completely wrong, you don't find out right away possibly at the beginning of your idea and end up spending the time fleshing it out only to be wrong at the end. It's the whole writing an essay on completely the wrong topic idea.

Aaron Feng: Distributed Development Team

Distributed Development Team

"Distributed Development Team" by James Horsley