It was recently suggested by my practicum teammate, @samdkarp, that in lieu of formal daily “stand-up” meetings to support our agile software process we use Twitter to share our daily status. For a remote, part-time team with a variety of schedules we thought that this might be a good approach, allowing us to share status at our convenience. So far it has been a great way to coordinate; we’ve committed to at least daily updates so that we can have impromptu pairing sessions as team members are available. Including the hash tag #geocamsu has allowed us to capture our updates and display them as a feed on our Google Sites landing page. Our goal being to use it as a means of keeping our stakeholders' confidence up by keeping them in the loop.
Our use of HudsonJenkins CI should provide even more opportunity to incorporate Twitter into our process. We plan to create a test status account on twitter, driven by the Jenkins Twitter plugin. As we push our commits to GitHub, our Jenkins CI server will pull, run the test suite and tweet any changes in success status. Being able to include this status with our individual daily status has made Twitter our one-stop status dashboard.
Assuming that we continue to update as frequently as we plan to, Twitter should prove to be a great way for our remote team to get the benefit of a status meeting without the need for a dedicated daily time.