Background
At the beginning of the GeoCam Memo & Track projects, which I took part in with several of my classmates, we chose to experiment with the use of Twitter as a means of sharing daily status in lieu of a daily tag up. We were working remotely on the project part time in the evenings and on weekends so planning a time when all of us would be available on a daily basis was difficult. This was exacerbated by the fact that we spanned multiple time zones and had varying amounts of demand from our full-time jobs. Our assumption was that tweeting our daily status with a unique hash tag would provide us a quick and easy place to look to see the day’s progress and happenings.
Results
Twitter ended up nearly unused for coordination as the semester progressed. Our assumed need for a daily tag-up analog proved unnecessary after only a couple of days. We found that as remote students, we had been trained to work in a very coordinated manner already, using tools like Skype and Google Talk to informally plan, share status and coordinate. Twitter seemed redundant and only a couple of team members continued using it to post status for a couple of trailing weeks. It ended up being used primarily to provide occasional status updates to our customer and other potential contributors.
Coordination aside, we did get a good deal of use out of Twitter as a continuous integration tool. Our Jenkins CI instance was configured to post to twitter when a build or test failed. This proved a much cleaner yet still efficient mean of reporting CI status to the entire team than email. Having a public-facing CI report kept us a bit more aware of our build as well. It was harder to ignore them when we knew that our customer and anyone else could instantly see when we checked in bad code.
Thoughts
Based on our experience, I think Twitter could be a great coordination tool if used on the right team with the right process. For us, it was simply a matter of it not providing any additional value to our process. Our use of rotating pairs with pair programming required much more coordination than Twitter could have provided. I would actually go so far as to say that we’re likely an edge case. I would encourage other teams in different situations to give it a try (assuming, of course, that you don’t mind your status being public or you have a Twitter clone inside of your company). It was a great way to track status during the short couple of weeks that we were using it as intended and I will likely try it again with teams in the future.