Practical Development Environments

Chapter 11. Project Communication

The speed of the project is proportional to the speed at which information moves between people’s heads.

Alistair Cockburn

The End of Software Engineering

This chapter discusses how communication can be improved within a project by using a range of different tools, including web pages.

Imagine if all builds took no time at all and we all wrote perfect code. Then the limiting factor in how long software takes to write would probably be how well the people in a project communicated ideas with each other. Even back in the real world, where we all have to wait for our builds and where bugs somehow spontaneously appear in our code, poor communication in a project still wastes enormous amounts of everyone’s time. Many cases of poor communication are for complicated and emotional reasons, and when a group of people don’t want to communicate with each other about something, no mere tool can make it happen. However, providing a group with different communication tools can encourage them to communicate better.

Tools for Communication

Some of the most helpful tools for project communication have common characteristics. These characteristics are:

Easy to use

If a tool is hard to use, people will use other tools instead. Obvious, but often overlooked.

Context

Who is speaking? When did they speak? Who were they talking to? Without this kind of context, all communication becomes harder to understand.

Active and passive modes

Sometimes you want to find information or ...