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

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.