Pros and cons of Slack, GoToMeeting, JIRA, Confluence | Agile web development in Washington DC

At the end of every sprint we run Agile retrospectives to discuss and analyze what went well in the sprint and what could have been done better. We have come to the conclusion that usually, poor communications, assumptions and failure in expectations management are the reason why things go wrong.

Although Agile is not about tools but about people working together and focusing on delivering things that add value, we can’t deny that tools facilitate communications among the team, specially if they work in a distributed environment, and it also help the team to be conscious of the progress and take decisions with the product owner to focus on high priorities and manage the backlog.

However, if used wrong, those tools can create more confusions and reprocesses. For instance, have you ever tried to discuss a user story over Google Hangouts (chat) or Slack? every time I do it, I end having mixed communications about multiple details, plus it takes longer to communicate. Then, what about just using your phone and go over that user story? I bet that the conversation will be more effective, but if you just hop on a conference call with your team and share screens to go over those requirements, at the end of that call everybody is going to be on the same page.

In order to avoid communication issues we identified the pros and cons of all the tools we use and decided how to use them right.

Tool	Purpose	Limitations	Pros	Great for
Slack	Team communications, audio calls, reminders	Only Slack users can access that environment	Usable interface Creation of channels integrates with other systems Customizable (bots, etc) Search for messages Feature messages	Quick communications Set reminders Notifications from other systems that get intregated with it
Gmail	Submission of messages	Hard to track conversations.	No need to invite the recipient to be able to communicate All messages are archived Integrates with Google Drive to upload attachments	Long communications that need details
Phone	Conversations	Recordings are not supported	Recipient is very easy to reach	Quick communications Critical communications
JIRA	Project management, track status of tasks, coordination of tasks, time tracking	Only JIRA users can access that environment	Usable interface for tasks Integrates with other systems Customizable (create own boards, own workflow, etc)	Quick check of status and priorities Coordination of tasks Delegation of tasks among the team
Confluence	Documentation, wiki	Only JIRA users can access that environment	Create tasks in JIRA Creation of micro sites / wikis Integrates with other tools	Documentation
GoToMeeting	Video calls, sharing screens	Only one meeting per account Requires of a launcher to use it It can affect the performance of the computer that is using it, therefore call can be affected.	You don’t need an account to join a call. Use your phone for voice Screensharing has high resolution Allows to record meetings Recordings are considerably small in size Integrates with mobile devices very well	Sprint demos Sprint planning Pair programming Pair review KSR
Hangouts	Team communications, video calls, screen sharing	Only Google accounts can access that environment Hard to track conversations per project. Screen sharing has low resolution It doesn”t record meetings	Integrates with mobile devices very well It allows all the team to do calls simultaneously	Very quick video calls Jumping on a call quickly
Google Drive	Store and share documents	Only Google accounts can access that environment Hard to find content	Share folders and files with other Google accounts Ability to move files to different locations without losing original link Integrates with OS to upload/download information from OS folder Handles big files Good storage limit Allows colaboration and version control	Sharing files with Gmail accounts Collaborating on a document Storing documentation
Dropbox	Store and share documents	Only Dropbox users can access that environment Hard to find content	Share folders and files with other Dropbox accounts Integrates with OS to upload/download information from OS folder Handles big files Good storage limit	Sharing files with Dropbox accounts Collaborating on a document Storing documentation

Based on that analysis, we defined communication protocols to ensure that our projects are well documented and the team use the right channel to reach other people when they are teleworking or located in a different city.