Slashdot Mirror
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?
I recently did some research into (but not actual production use of) SpecLog. It's part of a TDD suite built as a Cucumber implementation for .NET. However, SpecLog is the one product that steps out of the IDE and allows devs, managers and clients to all be on the same footing. It's basically a digital whiteboard made specifically for specifications and requirements gathering. It uses a repository backend which allows for remote input and synchronization, and a graphical interface that lays out and connects features, user stories, actors and business goals all together.
Ever tried OpenMeetings (http://openmeetings.apache.org)? It has a whiteboard in it and I have been in group discussions using it, voice and video. Not as good as a face to face but better than having to travel especially when weather makes it difficult. I think Google Hangouts does something like that too but have not tried it.
http://www.rocketboard.it/
No, seriously.
I know I've seen systems that use sensors you mount around the edge of a whiteboard and special markers to track where you are drawing and reproduce it electronically on remote monitors -- it's on a cheap system, but it's cheaper than flying people in airplanes all over the place.
You could also just have the whiteboard person use a graphics tablet, and skip the big arm movements.
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 have used pretty much every tool out there skype, goto meeting hangouts to name the more popular ones. But when I did some work with E-bay a while back I got a chance to work with their lifesize system. The camera the screen the high definition and the lack of lag come together to make something far better then anything else I used. I suspect they charge an arm and a leg for such a setup but it works. (I have no financial intrest in lifesize )
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.
God spoke to me
We use the combination of Microsoft Lync, where you can start a common whiteboard, and a Wacom Tablet, so you can do some freehand drawing.
It is not free. But the cost is offset after one meeting with members from all over the world...
Okay, so the submitter asked for "good" solutions, and this may not qualify, but it's what I do: A whiteboard at each location, with a camera pointed at it. I can't draw on your drawing, but I can see what you draw, and you can see what I draw. I've experimented with various web-based shared whiteboards, but they all require drawing on the computer. Even with a tablet (either Wacom-style attached to a laptop/PC or a mobile device) and a pen, a real whiteboard is better.
In my case, generally there are at most three locations in the meeting, and usually only two: My home office and a group of people in a conference room. Having more may make the "real whiteboards" solution less effective.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
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.
I worked on a product that tried to solve this problem... It's but super expensive and not very well executed: Bluescape.com. There are youtube videos showing it in action.
The best thing out there I've seen is mural.ly
The problem you're having isn't a whiteboard issue. It's not technology. It's that you're only getting half the message.
You may not be aware of it, but person-to-person communication is extremely high bandwidth. It's so high that we rarely even recognize the component parts of it, and only come up with little more than a mux generalization, like "they're angry" or "they're unsure". Our minds look at someone's stance and posture, at the speed they're blinking, where their eyes are looking, whether or not there's a nearly imperceptible pause when they're about to say certain words, subconscious muscle tics, and so on, and it passes through this great big neural net and some sort of amazing transformation happens and we get discrete knowledge out the other end. What's more, what they're doing is always going to partially be a response to what we're doing; we're providing real time feedback and both of us are adjusting ourselves accordingly. We're so good at it, that about 5 words into an introduction, we can usually tell if someone likes us or not.
On the other hand, a digital whiteboard, even with audio and video, we can't attempt to get this nuance or the feedback response that a person-to-person meeting allows. There's no way to send that much information successfully.
That's why no digital whiteboard will ever beat the real thing. Because these solutions do not allow you to see each varied nuance and react to them, and allow the other parties to do the same in turn. That's why a person-to-person meeting takes 5 minutes to cover what would go 30 minutes in a phone call. Or why video calls always seem to take far more time than you've allocated. That's why all those business types are always doing face to face meetings and ignoring 90% of our technical advances down here in the trenches of engineering, where we're trying not only to solve a problem with technology poorly, but we're not even aware of what the problem actually is.
Let me sum it up for you; there is no technological replacement that comes close to the clarity and efficiency possible - and likely - in a face to face.