Collaboration: Communications
There are many forms of communication that are possible for teams. At companies certain forms are encourage or required and this will varry from company to company as well as between different teams. There is no right or wrong form of communications.
Inside Industry
Inside Industry
Neil Jones, Google Software Engineer
You’ll need something to handle docs, calendars, spreadsheets, instant messaging, email, group emails, possibly phone calls, video conferencing.
Beyond Email & Documents & Calendars -- Code Based Instant Message
In recent years there have been a number of instant messaging system's like Slack and Hipchat and more recently Discord that have been employed in SW Project Development. As you are undoubtable familiar with messaging it only remains for you to try it out and see if it works for your team.
Inside Industry
Inside Industry
Janice Leung, Google Software Engineer
Slack/IM is quite nice for quick pings, but larger decisions (that should be written down) should probably be tracked in email (sent to a group) and/or in a bug. This ensures that several years down the line, the history is still available for reference. Face to face meetings are always useful, and better than trying to debug over IM. But it's important for the meeting to have an agenda, or it will just be a waste of everyone's time.
This is possibly a "strange" tip but, you need to be careful with life-work balance and communications. Life-work balance is the ability to have a good quality of life and in my opinion that means spending some quantity of hours not working. So, be careful about over-communicating, and respect others non-working hours as well as your own.