What group collaboration/information tools are useful?

Question

Being part of a company with hundreds (if not thousands) of developers arrayed over a wide range of projects, it can be very hard to get the information you need from the right person about a piece of software you are working on. What kinds of tools (and practices) have you found useful for finding answers, knowledge transfer, documentation, collaboration, etc? Solutions that can be installed/maintained in-house are preferred so as to protect company IP.

Update: We use Perforce for our source control, and tool integration is a huge plus. (For example, Code Collaborator is a new tool to our arsenal, and the ability to add a Perforce changelist directly to a code review is huge.) At the end of the day though if a tool is simply brilliant whether or not it integrates with what we have in place already becomes a secondary priority.

Open source v. commercial isn't as big a deal as being able to host the services on our side of the firewall. I was actually thinking something like SO for internal, IP-based queries could be a real benefit to the company-- tools like that where you really see their benefit with respect to delivering timely and accurate knowledge right where it needs to go.

We have our own bug-tracking system; I'm more interested in knowledge-transfer/documentation/communication tools and processes.

Answer 1

We use MediaWiki for our internal knowledge base, and FogBugz for issue tracking.

MediaWiki is free, and FogBugz is well worth the cost IMHO.

Answer 2

Bugzilla for bug tracking.

Answer 3

The answer really depends on a number of factors:

• Do you (or your managers) have a preference of open source vs commercial software?
• What source control product do you use (if you want nice integration)?
• What other tools do you use that you may want to integrate with your documentation, bug-tracking, etc?

If you are jumping in with a clean slate, I would recommend Track for documentation, release notes and bug tickets (it also integrates well with source control tools and IDEs.

along the commercial route, I have heard really good things about FogBugz (mentioned by a previous poster).

You may want to clarify your situation a bit more in order to get more specific answers. Some tools are better/worse based on details of your situation (language used, IDE, etc).

Hope this helps a bit.

Answer 4

We use Fogbugz for issue tracking, discussion and wikis (this is by choice).
We use Jabber for instant messaging (this choice is not up to us - at least it works, though).

We are actively trying to get rid of email:

1. The set of people who actually need the information almost never seem to be on the To: line.
2. The set of people who don't care and / or will actually make the problem worse are almost always on the To: line.
3. The moment you send an email, it disappears into everyone's Inbox, followed by an archive that is as close to write-only-memory that is physically possible.

Answer 5

Trac for an open-source bug tracking system, written in Python.

Answer 6

I think you need a combination of tools, and a reward system for people utilizing them. I'm assuming you have source control and bug tracking already...the tools I would suggest are:

1. wiki - to house static/historic information including: documentation, common issues/work-arounds, people's bio (its always nice to know who's who), contact info, etc.
2. IM/Twitter like tool (possibly Google Wave once its live) - to inform people what you're doing, roadblocks you currently have and urgent requests for help (I'm pushing X live and the prod system is not responding as expected..)

I would say an internal StackOverflow would be great - combo of questions/answers and wiki...