Google gmail and google docs for managing a software development project

Question

Has anyone used Google gmail, docs, calendar, gadgets, etc. for managing software development projects? If so, what was your setup?

• how many clients
• how many software developers on your project (in-house? out source?)
• how did your sponsors, clients and developers like it?

Did you find it beneficial? or would you rather have used a commercial project management app?

Answer 1

According to this article, Twitter has used Google documents for project management and interaction, and it didn't work out so well for them. I think the thing to take from this issue is that for a large company, the document sharing that's enabled by the google docs philosophy doesn't work so well.

Mind you, I use Google docs for my personal projects, and I'm quite happy with it; but I wouldn't think of using it for large scale distributed project management, and it's precisely because of the issue brought up the linked article; your security is only as good as your weakest link at that point, and the problem is that when you have lots of links, one of them is going to be pretty darn weak. So I'd say the answer to your question depends a lot on what scale you're talking about.

Answer 2

I've used google docs for document and project management on a distributed team of about 4. It was for a single project with only one client. It is fast and easy to setup. Great for small teams. For anything larger I'd go with redmine or basecamp.

Answer 3

I used Google docs for some small projects between 3-5 developers in different cities. It helped out so that we did not have to email, or ftp the documents to each other, but I can see on a large scale that it would be harder. For a small group I think it works fine.

I have used other commercial apps (some good and some bad) before and the using of the Google Docs for the small group was ok compared to them. The price was right for our small group and supported us in our efforts.

Answer 4

I have used Google Apps for small teams (around 10 people) and I think it works well.

Gmail and Google Talk for communication

Google Docs for document sharing

Google Sites for project information and task management

Google Calendar for scheduling and milestones

If Google had some kind of GDrive that would be a nice app as well so we could share all types of documents.

Google Sites was the key to bring everything together for our team.

One thing I couldn't figure out how to do well is time tracking and time management.