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

White board is and will always be the best way

[Anonymous Coward]

sorry, but we are physical beings.

Does this ever actually work?

[Anonymous Coward]

Really, asking Slashdot? All you're going to get is a bunch of snarky comments and a holy war or two.

A couple solutions

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

1) You can use Join.me or Gotomeeting and everyone can share the same picture. Fire up a paint program, and voila whiteboard. I find coding with multiple people actually is cool when everyone can see the screen instead of being uncomfortably bunched together.

2) For a bulletin board todo list, use www.Trello.com

I love telecommuting work, it feels more efficient than in person office work.

Re:Whiteboards and whiteboarding are a bad idea.

[BitZtream]

If you can't express the idea in text and text alone, then you haven't broken it down properly

A picture is worth a thousand words, FOR A REASON.

And you're an idiot.

I don't need to write a manuscript to describe an abstract problem when a couple boxes and some lines will do the same thing. That doesn't mean I've given exact specifications for a problem either.

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.

Anyone who has worked with UML and thinks you convert that to code doesn't understand code, they've just bought into the UML hype (thats still happening? WTF I thought it died 15 years ago). You seem to think the drawing is the code, and again, you're an idiot. The drawing is a way to describe whats happening in an abstract way so others have a general idea of the concept. It IS NOT the code, its abstract logic.

UML and Java ... you pretty much showed in that little blurb you're not qualified to be part of this discussion. Go back to being a middle manager who doesn't know anything about software design or actually writing code.

Try to meet in person

[jgotts]

There is no substitute for meeting in person. We've evolved over millions of years to meet with each other in person. Every distributed meeting I've ever attended has had yelling, mumbling, and misheard things caused by technological failures.

If you're sketching out your next year's worth of work, spend the money and get together for it.

If you're just talking about a couple of minor issues, then by all means use a distributed whiteboard.

Re:Whiteboards and whiteboarding are a bad idea.

[Half-pint HAL]

If you can't express the idea in text and text alone, then you haven't broken it down properly.

...and at the planning stage, you are still trying to break down the problem. The core concept behind team thinking is that individually, we often fail to analyse the situation completely, and input from others can show holes in our reasoning and things we've failed to properly consider. The whole, hopefully, is greater than the sum of its parts.

I'm coding alone at the moment, and because I have no-one to bounce ideas off, I frequently find myself heading into dead-ends because the problem domain I'm dealing with is very large, and as there's no-one to discuss things with, I need to prototype to find my mistakes. Then I have to go back and rewrite.