We don’t have an office, so we all work from home and several of the team have never met each other. We have a weekly call for 2 to 3 hours that starts with personal banter so we get to know each other (a double edged sword if ever there was one!) and feel more of a team. That’s one of the big things you lose when working from home.
Then we each talk for a minute or two about what we did work-wise in the last week. We typically all work on different projects, so no one would know what anyone else was doing if we didn’t do this.
Finally, we talk about anything interesting we have found regarding testing tools, test techniques, weird code and bugs we have encountered, new or obscure HTML elements and CSS properties etc… Interpretation of WCAG accessibility guidelines and other standards is always a big topic because they are mostly written so badly.
Creating a searchable repository
We record that last section of the call and manually index it so we have a searchable database of every discussion. That’s time consuming, so we have just started to use Zoom’s AI Companion feature to generate a summary instead. It’s surprisingly good, although it can make bad mistakes and often attributes comments to the wrong person. However, we can live with that as long as it contains all the relevant keywords we may want to search for in order to find videos containing those topics.
We’ve been doing this for about 3 years and we rarely cancel a weekly call - I regard them as mandatory because they are so important. And we’ve never run out of topics to discuss.