Collaboration Tools

There are many engineers and teams in Infobip, so how do we communicate with each other? It depends on the type of information that we need to share or request.

We Prefer Slack (and Microsoft Teams) Over Email

The most used communication tool in engineering is Slack. All teams use it for everyday communication, daily syncs, questions about current tasks and to agree when will they go to the lunch together. Slack is also used when a team needs support from a different team. All incidents are also reported on Slack and they are visible to every engineer. Every team can create as many channels as they want, and it is easy to find channels from different teams and share information. Communication is fast and effective. Notifications can be configured easily and engineers are not spammed with irrelevant informations.

Besides Slack, we also use Microsoft Teams, mostly for meetings and for communication with non-engineers in Infobip. Meetings are synced with Microsoft Outlook and it is easy to schedule a call, invite any Infobip employee, record the meeting and share it with others.

Most engineers prefer Slack over Teams due to better user experience, and Teams is missing pretty useful feature - threads for channels. It greatly improves readability, because people who are interested in topic can read messages, and others can just skip it.

Some information is still shared via email, but our engineers don't prefer it because communication is slow and usually too many people who should not be included - are included (cc). Email is mostly used to share company news, changes in organisation and some bigger initiatives that affect most of engineering teams. Engineers depending on their OS use Microsoft Outlook/Office 365 to check emails and also to schedule meetings. All meetings are listed for each person and it is easy to see which time slot is available for all requested members.

Jira For Task And Confluence For Documentation

All tasks and technical initiatives are kept in Atlassian Jira. Every Requirement Area (RA) owns a few Jira projects, where relevant tasks are linked. Some teams request Jira tasks to provide support, but all urgent questions are usually discussed on Slack. It‘s a pretty powerful tool and it is very useful to us, even if it seems a little complicated at the beginning. All progress is tracked and analysed in a single tool. It also has an API and some teams are using it to automate specific things, such as sudo access tracking.

Technical documentation, meeting notes, tutorials, how-to articles and blog posts is shared on Atlassian Confluence. It‘s a pretty simple tool so that everyone can write good looking documentation and share it to the entire company with a single click. The only thing that we don't like is the search option. Sometimes it is hard to find some older articles, even if you type exact keyword that are used . We have also enabled the "karma" feature, which is basically like reputation points. The more you contribute to Confluence (write articles, receive likes and comments), the more karma you get. There are daily/weekly/monthly/yearly karma rankings, so that is another motivation for employees to write more documentation and useful articles.

Facebook Workplace For Casual Content

Recently we started to use Facebook's Workplace. It is like company's Facebook where some official and lot of unofficial information is shared; like local office news, learning and development suggestions, conference opinions, jokes, etc. But why we need another tool like this, when we have all the others? Because we don't want to spam employees on other channels with not-so-important news and casual content. They are actively monitoring Slack, Jira and similar tools. We use Workplace when we want to take a break from work and read other company information.