How to choose the best messengers for web development

Nowadays there is a myriad of messengers apps to use. A few of them are good for keeping communication inside the web development team. Then, how to choose the one that’s best suited? How to choose the the best messengers for web development team?

Functionalities

Consider the functionalities of the messenger’s candidate app. At the very least, it should have these functionalities:

Upload pictures . Based on my experience working in web development industries for almost 9 years, sharing screenshots is one of the most frequent activities.

Upload videos . Sometimes, it’s better to upload a screencast video to show how does your QA reproduce that bug.

Alerting service . Not a mandatory for a small development project, but it can be very helpful. Alerting that errors have happened or the main live site is down to all members of the technical teams can speed up the process to fix the problem.

Supports for group conversation , instead of one-to-one conversation. So, we can keep everyone in the group updated.

Integration . It’s even better if the messenger app has integration with many major services which we often use on web development:

• Jira/Trello/Pivotal Tracker or any project management service

• Circle CI

• Semaphore

• and the likes

Mobile app availability

I believe that most modern messengers apps starting with their mobile app. That’s cool. Just make sure that the messengers you will use to communicate among the development team members also have their native apps on both Android and iOS.

Stability and status page

It won’t do any good if your chosen messenger service often gets outage. Therefore, you need to choose the most robust one.

Even better if the messenger service has a status page where they announce any issues that are happening. Then, they can update the progress as they’re fixing it down the road. Or, give better estimations about how long the service will be up again.

Knowing that the service you use is actually out of service will give you a bad feeling. However, knowing the teams behind it are working hard to bring it up as soon as possible is surely giving a relieve.

Responsive customer support staffs

You don’t know if you’ll get the problem with the service. It’s worst when you know you’re the only one who gets the problem and yet their status page is saying everything is fine.

Here’s why you need an app that has responsive customer supports staff. It will be better if there’s live chat support or live phone support.

Area of availability

This is important if the member of the development team are spreading all over the world. We need to make sure the country where one of team member lives did not block it.

Web browser can open it

Most of the time, we develop the web on our laptop, PC, or Mac. It’s going less efficient if we need to look at a mobile phone just to get updates from the discussion about the new specifications.

Ideally, it’s more effective and efficient when I can just switch tab on my browser to see if there’s any new message on the Slack or Skype or E-mail.

Verdicts

Based on all the factors above, we think these are the most suitable messenger apps for the most web development team:

• Slack.

• Skype.

• WhatsApp?

There may be more messengers apps created specifically for web development.

But, as far as we know, those three were the best-suited ones. Except that some countries may block their service.