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by XP Cincinnati.
Original Post: Apart and yet Together
Feed Title: XP Cincinnati
Feed URL: http://xpcincinnati.org/xml/rss/feed.xml
Feed Description: XP Cincinnati is the website of the XP Cincinnati eXtreme Programming Users Group.
I spent two years work with a team of people that were located in different places. All within an hours drive but far enough that we didn’t like the commute.
We experienced a few different situations but I wanted to talk about how we address communications.
After trying RogerWilco, Skype and the my old nemesis NetMeeting, we found Ventrilo. This is a VoIP product targeted at gamers so that they can shout “die you bastard” just before they frag someone. A valuable feature indeed, but we wanted a way to ensure that our group of programmers could work together with as few communications problems as possible.
With everyone setup with mic and speakers we configured Ventrilo in “press to speak” mode so that we would only hear each other when we wanted to be heard.
This was a downside of Skype and identified our first learning. Too many unexpected noises can be a bad thing. While a conventional Agile room would allow you to hear everything all the time, we determined that the technology couldn’t eliminate enough background hiss and, because different people had different quality equipment, some were louder than others which resulted needing to keep your volume quite high making the background noise worse.
The Ventrilo window shows a list of the people connected, so each morning we would do our stand-up meeting, in turn, top of the list to the bottom. We are consultants and had great success with one client getting them, located in a different state, to connect in each morning to join us.
Another problem we ran across was needing multiple simultaneous conversations. To do this we created a main room for everyone to meet in and then “off-line” rooms for groups to move into when they needed to have a heated design conversation. This also served as a quite place for people to skulk off to when the chatter in the main room became to much.
We had a smattering of other problems:
One developer could not keep his machine running for long when Ventrilo was active. He would join for the stand-up and then drop off so that his machine would not blue screen.
Another couldn’t understand the conversation well enough to work in that environment.
We found no decent whiteboard solution . VNC was great for desktop sharing but limited the participation a little.
Managing private conversations takes extra care. With the windows minimized you can press the button and talk and not always be clear about who is listening.
The product offers password protected rooms and all conversations are limited to the room they are in, so we ended up with multiple customers sharing the same server but only being allowed to enter specific rooms.
This was all very successful but is background to my new experience. Working with a new group today in our Agile room we had one member working from home. In order to keep them as closely connected as possible we setup Ventrilo expecting the same level of success I had experienced previously.
The problem ended up being that the remote developer could not hear the conversations we were having because we were using Ventrilo in “press to talk” mode. This only works when all developers are separated.
The solution we migrated to was a speaker phone. Sounds much simpler except that the remote developer didn’t have one so couldn’t always be as in touch as we would have liked and ended up with a crick in his neck from holding the receiver on his shoulder.
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