Online asynchronous collaboration tools?

[jducoeur]

Howdy, all -- looking for thoughts, especially from the engineers in the crowd but not necessarily limited to them.

I've just found myself as one of the leaders of a big new software project -- big enough that we're going to be needing to spread the work across several teams, in various places around the world. That includes India, so figure ~12 timezones away from me. Collaboration is going to be a serious challenge, and one that we need to take seriously if we're going to succeed.

I'm sure that some of my friends have dealt with similar problems, so I'm looking for any and all thoughts. Tools, techniques, beartraps that you've run into -- this is an open-ended conversation, just keep it civil and accept that the team is what it is. I probably don't have the power to force this to all be on-shored, so the question is, how do we make the best of it?

We can probably slice-and-dice it so that different teams are working in different repos with distinct areas of responsibility, at least. The real question is how to manage questions and conversations about everything from coding style to architecture to requirements when we can't easily all get into a meeting together. It's not a rare problem, and I suspect there are best practices I don't know about yet.

Thoughts? Ideas?

Comments

[juan_gandhi]

I recommend slack. I've been using it for about 9 years now. Replaces email. Configurable (you can add bots). And, what some people may find important - no BCC available.

[danabren]

I second this.