Software Development Communication Media

As I have maintained this online engineering log over the past couple of weeks, I have started to think more generally about the types of media used in a software development team to communicate and coordinate activities:

(1) Requirements and Design documents. These are relatively static documents, providing a high-level perspective. Relatively non-interactive.

(2) Mailing lists. Provide a forum for threaded communication. Generally ASCII oriented. Generally interactive.

(3) JavaDocs. Generated from the code itself. Communicates API-level information. Non-interactive. Context-sensitive with the code.

(4) Engineering logs. Semi-interactive way for an individual developer to document design issues, questions, and so forth. Others could potentially comment on log entries.

(5) CM Commit messages. Provides a record of the changes made to a set of sources.

(6) Issues. Provides a decomposition of the high level requirements/design documents into a set of tasks. Also records bugs found.

(7) IM. Generally non-persistent, highly interactive means for developers to get immediate, synchronous feedback and help.

(8) Face to face meetings.

Recently, I was thinking about an idea that I wanted to discuss with the Hackystat software development team, and I was unsure of how to do it:

• Send it as an email to the developer's mailing list?
• Write about it in my online engineering log?
• Write about it in my online engineering log, then send a link to that entry in an email to the developer's mailing list?