Being one of the lucky few who telecommutes full time. You can drag my cold, lifeless body into an offirce, thanks very much. So, the big issue that you face when telecommuting is how to talk to all your fellow co-workers. Where I work, we use our own IRC server to not only talk to each other (we’re spread across three time zones) but as front-line support for our customers as well. This actually works out quite well, so I’ve been thinking about what other tools are helpful for this.
In terms of just talking amongst yourselves, it seems that Campfire has a lot to offer. In fact, I would consider using it at work if we weren’t running our own IRC server. Via Giles Bowkett I found out about Propane, a desktop client for connecting to Campfire. Really cool stuff, and it makes me wonder what other options are out there.
An oft-neglected category of communication tools is messages about what has been worked on by the developers. Me, I can’t stand having someone coming around all the time asking me when I’ve finished what I’m working on. As a result I decided to be proactive and configured post-commit hooks for our company SVN repositories. So now any of us who do coding work commits something, we all get a nice email about it. Since I’ve done that, we’ve been a lot more proactive about testing things because, well, you can no longer hide when you’ve made a change. 
As for bug and ticket tracking, well, we’ve got a homebrewed system (created before I got there) that I don’t really like. However, it is not going away so if I want to make any changes I will have to make them myself. First thing I was thinking about was adding something to the post-commit hooks that will add a comment to the thread for particular ticket indicating you checked in some code that dealt with the ticket. A common feature in things like trac I’m sure, but one I’d like to see in our own system.
Let me know in the comments what type of tools you use at your company.
Tags: bug tracking, Campfire, irc, SVN, telecommuting, tickets, tools
Interesting coincidence, as I just spent some time getting trac installed on a server yesterday.
While it’s a pain to get installed and running, which may depend on your server configuration though, you are provided with a complete set of tools for your project(s) right out of the box, including a wiki, ticket & bug tracking, timeline, roadmap and source browser to your repo.
It’s also the tool of choice of the CakePHP team and seems to work out for them pretty well.
Jira seems to be a popular commercial alternative, which is used by the ZendFramework team for example. It looks quite fancy, but I haven’t had the chance to actually use it myself yet. Anyone knows of its pros and cons, beside its price point?
I’m also telecommuting and we have a jabber server running for our chatting needs, but also our own internal VoIP, thanks to Asterisk.
What do you use at work when it comes to online meetings?
@Hendrik
Yes, I have experience with trac but with an existing system in place, *I* would be the one required to port all the tickets over. No thanks.
For online meetings, we use IRC to chat with each other. We also use teleconferencing services when we have clients who need to speak to us over the phone.
We’ve been using Trac and Basecamp for some time but recently switched over to Redmine. Trac was great but IMO needed too many hacks to work in multi projects environment (single instance for every project was hard to maintain), Basecamp was missing some Trac functions. Redmine looks like something between. It has a long way ahead but is very promising.
1000th comment! w00t!
1000th comment!
I actually built a tool for small-team communication.
It’s half twitter, half shared-to-do-list.
Was hoping to add svn integration, but oh well.
There’s only so much time.
Damn You John Anderson! You did it while I was typing a useful message!
“Trac” all the way. Would love some more fancy interface but hell.. it works. I keep track of commits with RSS.
Personally I would never use a third party online service when it comes to internal communication. You give away control over security & backups and you will start depending on the service.
What if they switch over to a new system, which you are unable to adopt to?
What if they pull the plug over night?
What if their system gets compromised, e.g.: recent twitter staff account hack?
With your own local communication solution, e.g.: IRC/Jabber server, …, you get full control over its configuration and if anything goes wrong, you will be able to address it directly without having to wait for a reply from a 3rd party support.
However, it may be nice for project to client communication, where you have everything in one place for a specific project and where your client is allowed to add his comments to it as well, or if you don’t have the means to support your own server/service.