No Open Blockers

Despite the fact that the team I’m currently on only has around 8 people, we still manage to span three different time zones. Needless to say, it’s not exactly simple for us to gather around a whiteboard and hash things out. With our move to using agile process techniques (more on that in other blog, it’s a beefy topic), we had a monthly need to be able to work on user stories and tasks together. For a while, we tried frequent saving to a single wiki page, but that had a few obvious limitations.

After experimenting with a few different approaches, we found ourselves regularly using gobby. I took the post title directly from their site, but it doesn’t do justice to just how fluidly it all comes together.

Gobby lets everyone logged into a gobby server type at the same time on the same document. Ugh, even that doesn’t showcase how cool it works in practice. The changes are sent in real time to every user, which both provides a very seamless collaboration environment as well as lets my teammates know just how bad I really am at typing (I’m even worse when I realize other people are watching me mistype every third letter).

The screenshots on their site are a little small. And frankly after trying to take one myself, I realize why: text doesn’t shrink well. Anyway, I tried to take one from our last sprint planning meeting to give an example of what I’m talking about (click on it for the full sized version which looks a bit better):

Each person who logs into the gobby server chooses their own background color. Whenever a user types something, those changes are highlighted in that user’s color, which (in our case at least) is less about ownership and more about differentiating changes. Again, realize each user can simultaneously type in the same document, which leads to an incredibly collaborative environment. And yes, seeing a document come together in different colors like that just plain looks cool.