Ask Slashdot: Whiteboard Substitutes For Distributed Teams?

DoofusOfDeath writes I work on a fully distributed software development team with 5-10 people. Normally it's great, but when we're doing heavy design work, we really need to all be standing in front of a whiteboard together. This is expensive and time consuming, because it involves airplanes and hotels. Conference calls, editing shared Google docs, etc. just don't seem to be the same. Have people found any good tools or practices to replace standing in front of a real whiteboard?

Comments

Whiteboards and whiteboarding are a bad idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

Whiteboarding is a symptom of a greater problem: the inability to properly break down concepts into simpler concepts.

Some may say that whiteboards are a tool to enable this, but that's never the case. Whiteboarding does the opposite. It allows the most vocal participants to add complexity to a situation.

If you can't express the idea in text and text alone, then you haven't broken it down properly. Drawing pictures on a whiteboard won't help with this.

In fact, it makes the situation even worse. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. More words are exactly what we're trying to avoid. We need fewer pictures, and hence fewer words to describe the concepts at hand.

Anyone who has worked with UML and any real programming language will know that this is true. One UML diagram can result in hundreds of thousands of lines of unnecessary Java code. Often that same Java code could, if written sensibly, take up less than a few hundred lines.

I'd bet surface hub would work well for this when

[Anonymous Coward]

probably will be expensive but does exactly what you are asking for