Tuesday, July 31st, 2007...5:08 am
tools i recommend for distributed development
For the past month or so I have been working in, and leading a distributed development environment. One of the digerati projects that is going…known as YouVersion, is being developed from Oklahoma, Texas, Tennessee, Georgia, and India. This has forced me to learn all about distributed development, and manage it.
So here are the tools that we are using, and really loving.
1) Basecamp by 37Signals. Project Managment and collaboration made simple.
2) Concept Share. An amazing online design collaboration tool.
3) iChat AV with Gmail Talk. Instant messaging is key for communication.
4) Subversion. A version control system. We will be implementing this tool very soon!
These tools have been key for our success so far. I will admit, I am such a relater, that everything in me just wants to walk out my office and talk with the team and point on the screen and show exactly what I want….so that has been a difficult adjustment. But, because of these tools, the process is getting better and better.

I lead the digerati team at
9 Comments
July 31st, 2007 at 8:52 am
Interesting that you’re using all those tools alongside one another - you should check out Huddle which combines some of these elements together!
Huddle has project management and document collaboration tools similar to Basecamp, but with a cleaner user interface. The best feature is that all your projects are accessed from a central personliased dashboard, so you only need to login once to access all your work with every client.
Every document within Huddle is automatically version controlled with a full audit trail- with the ability to roll back to previous versions if you need to. Documents are locked when a user is editing them, so you know instantly who is working on what and no-one duplicates any work.
Huddle are also building in instant messaging and web conferencing into the one system, so no need for 4 or 5 different tools from now on!
July 31st, 2007 at 10:17 am
Thanks for the link to Concept Share. This look brilliant.
July 31st, 2007 at 10:21 am
WOOO HOOO! Subversion rules all.
You should look to integrate Tracd for wiki-like for revision history and the like.
July 31st, 2007 at 10:11 pm
You forgot the tool that is holding YouVersion together…it’s a little known tool called coffee. I think it’s open source, but Starbucks is the version that is used the most!
July 31st, 2007 at 11:26 pm
Huddle. I have heard of it, but never really look at it. Something to look at for sure.
Dave, Concept Share rocks! Must check it out.
Zachary…how on earth did I miss that?
August 2nd, 2007 at 7:54 am
Subverision is a fantastic tool. We use it as a part of our development process at work, and I think we’d be lost without it.
Fair warning though — it’s a beast! There’s a ton of functionality to tame and understand.
August 2nd, 2007 at 3:52 pm
Basecamp — looks pretty cool. I signed up for the free portion to try it out. I am a developer and trying to figure out how I could use something like this to keep up with task and testing… Does it turn out to be to time consuming.
August 2nd, 2007 at 4:59 pm
I just came accross this. based off basecamp but its free http://activecollab.com
August 15th, 2007 at 10:50 am
Thanks for the great mention. We are really happy with the results that people are getting by using ConceptShare in their daily design lives.
If you like what we have done …you will really liek what we have coming out for v2 ….
cheers
Scott
ConceptShare.com
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