I fully agree! Wiki's so simple to settle and use that it definitely worth a try. I've installed different flavors of Wiki (TWiki, Ouin Ouin, JspWiki, PHPWiki) 4 times and always with the same result: simply great! At the beginning you face the "oh no, not a new techno" pattern, but quickly developers realize they can share the same information and that it is always up-to-date.
Here is an example of tasks my current Wiki is enabling:
List of people, contacts
Vocabulary used on the project
Team's To Do List
Team's Nice to have List
Team's Ideas' Box
Team's Tools List (with URLs)
Presentation of arrays describing any kind of affectation/associations, who's doing what for instance
... and many other usefull information that needs to be share and also concurrently managed
Choosing a solution offering a Wiki plus many more tools to manage a project is certainly the best Way. I use a home made one but was told GForge was good.
In addition to the shared knowledge base, people need to communicate. I recommand tools like Instant Messaging (Trillian) and emails (but try to define policies about emails use to avoid spams), but no phone! Calling someone by phone is perharps more enjoyable, but it implies a "both side lock" (both conterpart must be present at the same time) and no traces!
To reinforce those tools, you can set a forum to ease discussions, debates and, of course, a good bug tracking system (I personally appreciate Mantis) to manage properly the bugs fix.
No need to say that a versionning system has to be used! I'm still on CVS but plan to switch to Subversion.
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- List of people, contacts
- Vocabulary used on the project
- Team's To Do List
- Team's Nice to have List
- Team's Ideas' Box
- Team's Tools List (with URLs)
- Presentation of arrays describing any kind of affectation/associations, who's doing what for instance
... and many other usefull information that needs to be share and also concurrently managed
Choosing a solution offering a Wiki plus many more tools to manage a project is certainly the best Way. I use a home made one but was told GForge was good. In addition to the shared knowledge base, people need to communicate. I recommand tools like Instant Messaging (Trillian) and emails (but try to define policies about emails use to avoid spams), but no phone! Calling someone by phone is perharps more enjoyable, but it implies a "both side lock" (both conterpart must be present at the same time) and no traces! To reinforce those tools, you can set a forum to ease discussions, debates and, of course, a good bug tracking system (I personally appreciate Mantis) to manage properly the bugs fix. No need to say that a versionning system has to be used! I'm still on CVS but plan to switch to Subversion.