What tools do you use to share information among developers in your group? [closed]

Question

We already have mentoring, share information among each other, and hold regular technical sessions. However, we want these things written down, for the record and for new team members in the future. Right now we're at around 30 developers.

We're thinking about an internal blog and wiki.

While it would be great to share stuff on public blogs (and maybe even have official public developer blogs), for now we want to keep it internal. Our shop does mostly bespoke programming, and not products, so there will be a lot of proprietary customer information there. Self-censorship for a public blog will just slow us down.

Wikis are nice in concept but they need more organization and editorial, so I'm not convinced that it will be as sustainable.

How does your organization do it.

Answer 1

Wikis are great. They do need to be structured, but I think the biggest obstacle in getting a wiki to work is to get people to actually use it to write down relevant information.

At my previous job, we had an internal IRC-channel which was very useful for microcommunication. At my current job, this does not work at all; very few developers have the habit of using a chatprogram for work purposes.

Answer 2

Well, whatever technology or product you will decide to use, they will not be the problem. All knowledge which is not sufficiently well shared at the coffee machine needs attention.

• Attention when actually writing it (be it a document on a network drive, a wiki-page, a SharePoint server, whatever).
• Attention to categorize it (by linking, tags, web-pages, whatever...).
• Attention to keep it up-to-date (by individual on-demand or scheduled effort,).

Whatever you use, no technology will help with this. For this you need to motivate the team to write things down, read up things in the repository up first before phoning (and interrupting) a bunch of other team-members, and correct things if they are wrong.

From my experience, SharePoint and Wikis perform about the same. You need to beat people to use it, until they experience that they want to use it, because they will at some point experience that such type of information sharing can save time -- their time.

As you have already a habit of sharing information, this may not be so much of a hard problem for you. I'd recommend that one (or a few, better less than too many) provide some (spare) initial structure, and then let the fill-in begin. As no perfect categorization exists, you should not worry too much about it.