We’ve been using Slack for ages now, and we can no longer imagine what it was like to do projects before tools such as Slack existed. (We used to use Skype group chats; in hindsight that was so crappy, but there wasn’t much else — well there was IRC, but it somehow never caught on in our team).

Since slack added ‘reactions’ (the ability to add any emoticon to any message) we’ve seen an interesting trend emerge in our teams: ‘developer democracy’:

It’s annoyingly simple; you have the options, the discussions and the arguments all nicely tied together, including the actual results. Typically this leads to small incremental changes to our processes, and we try to document these on Confluence as we go along, including a link to the discussion on Slack, in case anyone wants to read back on how we arrived to a certain conclusion.

Works quite well for us so far.

(If you have an opinion on the above feature branch vote: we have job openings)

Photo credit: pjohnkeane (CC BY-SA)