Despite our SCRUM teams being mostly collocated, only one team has no remote members. Largely because of this, we make extensive use of collaboration tools:
- Ventrilo and Skype, for VoIP voice conferencing
- Mitel (which our company licenses) for on-demand desktop sharing and video conferencing
- Yahoo IM, for instant messaging and status broadcasts (flagging our current availability)
- Typewith.me, Google Docs, and Google Wave, for group brainstorming and live editing of sprint artifacts
- Campfire, for team discussion threads (to lessen our email burden)
- Drupal, for cross-team blogs, wikis, and discussion forums
- BBFlashback, for creating informal demos, tutorials, and braindumps
- Cacoo, for collaborative creation of flowcharts and diagrams, which can be linked into wiki pages and documentation source files
Love song to Cacoo
The last tool, Cacoo, is one I'm very excited about, as it solves many longstanding problems: how to put a diagramming tool in everyone's hands, how to make diagramming easy enough that everyone will create them, and how to update diagrams collaboratively. Our sprint reviews go more smoothly when we create diagrams that capture our progress through the epic, so that our customers don't have to remember what they were shown last review and which features are yet to come.
I'm also thrilled with how it's implemented, because I can link a diagram's image (PNG format) into a web page, and it always stays current with the latest diagram updates. I can also make that image clickable, so that it opens up the diagram for editing, if the viewer has access permissions to do so. Moreover, Cacoo can take and import screenshots, so it can serve as a native format for creating and updated annotated and composite screenshots. I see a lot of potential here to expand our visual communication!
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