Communications

If you have poor collaboration tools and/or folks don’t know how to use them you will be in trouble.   Defining what tool is used and when seems like a silly task but it will save you a lot of heartache in the long run. 

Slack
If you use Slack each channel should have a designated use and the team should know when slack is the appropriate medium vs something like email or documenting in confluence.  Here are a couple of channel examples with 'use definition': 

• JIRA - Any update to an issue (added, modified, comments)
• Confluence - Any update to a space/page (add, modified, comments)
• Bitbucket - Any update to Pull requests (add, modified, comments)
• Develop - Any update related to the actual development work or questions
• Process - Any update about the overall development process or changes to the process

One area to think about when creating channels in Slack is will the channels defined be granular enough to make sense if multiple projects are using this integration?  If we have project A and project Z and they are both utilizing the existing channels will the messages confuse other teams?  Should we create specific channels for each project?  Project A - Jira, Project Z - Jira so only those related issues will be seen in these channels and specific teams can subscribe to the channels they care about and will not be inundated with details of other projects they don't need to worry about. 

Collaboration Tools
A quick list of collaboration tools with the use will go a long way when on boarding new employees into the environment or adding different teams into the development studio. 

• Confluence - Project documentation and requirements are stored here.  Different spaces are created for each project. 

• Jira -  Issues/Work items are created here.  Each 'project' has it's own project in Jira.  Boards are created to show one or multiple project statuses.
• Bitbucket - Code repository.  All code is stored in this repo and any changes to code are made through a branch and pull request defined in the development process. 
• Jenkins/Bamboo/Team City - CI server is used to create builds, run tests (unit/e2e/etc), and do deployments 
• Webex - Used for meetings with more than 2 people and screen sharing.

Once everyone understands when/where/how to communicate it will save the team a ton of time. 
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