Communication and Documentation

We believe that one of the keys to working with a widely dispersed team, especially when they are in different timezones, is to provide ample forums for recording electronic documentation and providing archival access. We find that there are three types of systems that help the teams coordinate efficiently.

Project Wikis: Much like the large Wikipedia project, a project wiki is an invaluable place to record reference information for the project. Wiki’s are informally structured, and they make it simple for team members to add more information to them. Typical content would include resource locations, package descriptions, team member contact information, and triage / outage procedures.

We have standardized on the VqWiki  wiki application, as it allows us to deploy private Wikis for our customer’s teams. These can be easily created and feature RSS feeds, so the team is informed when new content is added.

Project Blogs: On a technical project, a group blog that allows all team members to post is a much better alternative than the typical email threads that accumulate and are deleted. A well-implemented project blog will typically contain a day-by-day list of the issues the team has faced, the resolutions, root causes, and what the plan and expected features are together for the next time period. This allows the project managers to look back over the project and more accurately understand what’s happening.

We use the Roller blogging software  as it is feature rich and scales very well. It runs thousands of internal blogs at IBM, is used by Sun to run their employee blogs, and runs more than 10,000 Java blogs at http://jroller.com/ .

Issue Tracking: A surprisingly large number of companies attempt to track issues by emailing excel spreadsheets full of bugs around the team. This inevitably degrades into a versioning nightmare, and bugs end up mysteriously disappearing or closed inappropriately. It’s difficult to support attachments, implement status change, and effectively manage the myriad issues in a site of any size without solid issue tracking software.

We use the Bugzilla issue tracking system () to manage bug reports and use it as a critical part of our production workflow. It provides email notifications whenever a bug is updated or resolved, which dramatically simplifies the problems associated with riding herd on the development team’s efforts.