Get A Room! – Why Campfire Rocks

Jason Sendelbach, Wednesday, March 18, 2009 @ 9:38 am

Campfire, a group chat program, allows teams to have chat rooms, and search the old chat content.  I used campfire about a year ago, right before we were going live on a project.  I hated it. Here's why:

• There were about 6 of us in the room, and we were all pairing on different activities.  I kept on having to check back into the room on things I really didn't care about.  I found that as soon as my pair and I finished a task, we had to scroll through pages of chat to get caught up on the details of the other pairs' activities.
• It was a web client, so I had to actively poll for updates.
• It seemed to detract time from my already busy schedule.
• We were all rushing to finish up things for go live, and it was a new program to the team.  Perhaps if we had used it all along, it may have been more useful

We recently started using it on the current project that I'm managing.  I now love it.  Here's why:

• Pyro - A campfire desktop app for the Mac.  I now get updates in the dock when messages are posted.  What's nice is that it only bounces once, so it's informative but not annoying.
• Rooms.  I guess we weren't using it super effectively in the past.  Now, if anything needs lots of detailed chat messages, we create a new room.  We can search it, and categorizes the content.
• Scrum chat - We now enter our scrum report into our Scrum room.  This helps in many ways, but especially with offshore resources.  We still have our dial in scrums, but now we can always check to the details of everyone's report and go back in history.  It also helps the developers figure out "what they did," when filling out their time-sheets.
• We all can keep updated of the details of the project.  When things are too detailed, I just skim over them once I figure out the jist of the content.  It also helps keep people updated when some show up early and others leave late.  Our team has early birds and those that burn the midnight oil.  It allows us to all get detailed information regardless of the hours we keep.
• We have found that we all need to keep a number of chat applications open with an offshore project.  Sometimes one or more of us forget to log into one or more of these.  We have found that Campfire helps us track down those that are not online.  Someone offshore may be trying to pair with someone onshore, but they are not on Skype.  They post something in Campfire, and the guy sitting next to him tells him to log in.
• It's a great way to communicate new changes to project policies without cluttering up the wiki.

Related posts:

1. Getting a team over the fear of daily scrums
2. Cucumber Rocks – But it’s not a replacement for unit tests
3. Agile Development for Product Managers: Why Agile Testing Rocks
4. Ajax, Agile and Offshoring
5. Application Watch – CShout

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Software Development

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1. 

   You might like Propane on the Mac and Ember on the iPhone:

   http://propaneapp.com/
   http://overcommittedapps.com/ember/

   - JD

   Comment by J.D., Friday, March 20, 2009 @ 9:33 pm

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