Collaboration means a group of people working together to create something. In general most software engineers do this in there day to day life. However the advances in technology and the increasing number of people working from distributed locations lead to more advanced online collaboration tools. Below are some online collaboration tools that are well suited for software engineers.
Confluence
Confluence is software to manage wiki’s. Wiki’s became very popular after the success of community driven websites like Wikipedia. Business started noticing this and adopted this to manage their business knowledge. People can share their articles and his peers can give feedback instantly. A great tool for manage business knowledge in a collaborative way.Creately
Creately is an online diagramming tool, specifically built for software teams. Even as a standalone diagramming tool it compares well and can be considered as an alternative to Microsoft Visio. But when it comes to collaborative tools it has no equal. You can invite multiple people to collaborate on a diagram and they can leave comments etc. so you can rectify your diagram accordingly. To further facilitate this feature they have special pricing plans for software teams.FogBugz
FogBugz is a bug tracking application which has collaboration support. Bug tracking has around for a while and there are very mature tools to do that. But the needs of organizations have changed and there is a need for much quicker input and increased efficiency. Accordingly bug tracking software has also changed. Now many people are involved when tracking an issue and they need a collaborative environment so they can communicate efficiently. FogBugz does exactly that.Google Docs
Image via CrunchBaseGoogle documents are another great free service by Google. It allows you to share your documents with others and easily improve them with their help. Supports multiple contributors and because they are tied with your Google account very easy to manage as well. If you are worried about the security of the documents you can use Google applications for business which provide some more additional security measures.Mentioned above are some great low cost tools that facilitate online collaboration. In the future we will see more and more companies using collaborative tools, so it is very important that you get familiar with them. Most of these tools have free and trial versions, so there is no reason not to try them out.[Bio – Nishadha Silva is used to work as a software engineer. Now he manages his own blog network and consults companies about using social media to grow their business. He is also looking for ways to grow Twitter followers without following back. Visit his blog to learn how to make money from blogging.]
