Discussions may take place through various channels. Typically there will be the following:
- Video Conferencing
- Developer channels
- And internal channels
This medium is leveraged mainly for sprints, reviews, and retrospectives with the customer. The ability to screenshare current progress and work items is beneficial to all participants.
Leverage e-mail for communication with wide audiences when immediate response is not necessary or information is more informational rather than actionable for particular members.
It is also ideal for coordination of meetings and scheduled moments of the project lifecycle.
This should be decided on early in the project. The intentions of these channels are to quickly pass information to key members of 18F and TrueTandem during the course of the project. We can accomplish this by using services such as:
- Gitter
- Slack
- Google Hangouts
- Mattermost
Whichever method is selected it is paramount to use it for collaboration and to be as open as possible.
The team primarily uses Google Hangouts for chat and video conferencing. Although depending on the team SSH with a terminal multiplexor (like tmux) is leveraged when screensharing is not ideal.
Rest assured GitHub will be utilized in some aspect during the project. Be comfortable interfacing with their services, handling issues, and working with pull requests.
Each project may differ as far as the tools leveraged for project management. Coming to understand this early may save in undo worry, stress, and frustration.
Just remember everything is a big TODO list with metrics and workflows applied. Be open to different work processes and adapt with what fits most with the stakeholders.