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teleworking tools and methodologies (was Re: Teleowrking [Was: Anyone looking to hire a Python/C++ developer?])

Brett g Porter BgPorter at NOartlogicSPAM.com
Thu Jan 3 10:38:56 EST 2002 
"Alex Martelli" <aleax at aleax.it> wrote in message
news:a11kd5$iqg$1 at serv1.iunet.it...
> What tools and/or novel methodologies have you found effective in
> such pursuits?  "Off-line" ideas (helpful across timezone gulfs
> are fine) -- CVS or other roughly equivalent schemes, email, wiki
> and/or newsgroups -- and some widespread "online" ideas also work,
> to some extent (muds/irc/intranet-based/...).  But I keep thinking
> there must be something better -- some good ways to simulate and
> enhance sitting next to each other at a keyboard.
My company is 100% distributed -- no 2 of us are in the same place (except
for admin staff at the home office in LA). From what I've seen, the success
of telework is more or less dependant on the culture of the company. I keep
running into people who have horror stories to tell about telecommuting (and
every so often I see articles on the "Telecommuting Backlash"). Almost
without fail, failures are tied to being a single telecommuter trying to
work in concert with a traditional office group. I'm not surprised that
those situations don't work most of the time.

The tools that we use are FirstClass (a workgroup server), CVS, and the
telephone when needed. Because all the other 'watercooler chatter' happens
online in the same space, nothing is lost (once you get used to working like
this). Most client communication happens on the workgroup server as well --
it's nice to have a paper trail of every decision on a project both
internally and externally. (where 'nice' == 'crucial').

We don't use pair programming, so that hasn't been an issue for us. The only
time that we've used video conferencing regularly (AFAIK) is when a team was
working on video conferencing software, so that was debugging and test as
well. I don't feel that I lose anything by not seeing faces.

YMMV.

BgP

--
// Brett g Porter * Lead Engineer, Development Practices
// BgPorter at artlogic.com * www.artlogic.com
// Art & Logic, Inc. * software engineering and design
// Desktop * Embedded * Web
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