Windows Developer Power Tools

13.0 Introduction

How critical is communication for a successful development team? As Code Complete, Peopleware, or any one of the seminal works on software engineering will tell you, team communication is just as important to a project as good design and solid development practices.

Poor communication saps the energy of your team and lowers the quality of your work. Productivity drops when team members miss important news relating to the project. Tempers flare as teams try to isolate who forgot to pass on which bits of information. Users get irritated because they can’t understand the documentation, or because there isn’t any.

You’ll have to overcome many challenges to ensure good communication and make your development team as productive as possible. How can you foster communication without holding your team hostage to endless meetings? How can you keep track of what’s being communicated without assigning secretarial duties to dedicated staffers? How can you demonstrate concepts and easily communicate with all your team members when some are working from remote locations?

These are difficult problems, but fortunately, technology has come to the rescue with innovative tools created by smart people. Want to get your team and customers involved in fleshing out project documentation without having to deal with passing around Word files? Check out the article on FlexWiki. Looking to implement some sort of system where you can broadcast project news to your team, customers, and potential ...