As consultants, my team is seldom gathered all in the same place at the same time. While we do have several large projects that frequently occupy many of us, we’ve got lots of smaller consulting gigs that keep us running around the greater Denver area a fair amount. However, we all collaborate regularly on little business development one-off demos, pet projects for conferences, and frequently collaborate on client projects when not colocated. One challenge that we’ve been having is maintaining the integrity of our central TFS store at the office without a nightmarish scenario of disconnected edits and merges (ever try that with a busy form designer???). In addition, we needed a central information store and place folks could go to ensure they’re all on the same page with regards to upcoming work items, standards for a given project, who is working on what bugs, etc. I figured SubVersion would be a good free source control resource whilst we were all disconnected or in different locations, but I just don’t have the time to set up the server side stuff, etc. and get all this stuff whacked together right now.
I read Dave Bouwman’s blog on a pretty regular basis since we used to work together and wouldn’t you know it, he’s got a great little post that, in part, extolls the virtues of Assembla. Turns out that this site is just the ticket. You get SubVersion and TRAC off the bat and also get a wiki and access to some Scrum tools as well. And since it’s free…it’s me. We were able to get a site up in no time and get several of our folks all collaborating online on several project demos we’re working on for upcoming conferences. The wiki and the Scrum tools will allow myself and the business development folks to track progress and issues as well. Check it out and see if it’s for you and your team. From my perspective this sort of resource is ideal for these smaller projects where folks are not necessarily colocated. And the Scrum components keep us all honest and agile…allowing reports from team members, scheduling of stand-up meetings, and chat as well.
