| If you work on a healthy team, public comments are better from my POV. I can remember many times, specially on new teams that I just joined, that by reading PRs, specially following https://conventionalcomments.org/, I get much faster the motto and the spirit of the team. You have the context and the focused discussions on the same place. You can also check how much time it took to deliver and even connect easier to the outcomes of the deliverables. If the discussion gets too subjective, use the team private chat, with threaded comms, then a direct call. I know it depends on the urgency as well, but we should strive for general efficiency, not efficiency only during rush / at the end of sprint. That's why also I prefer to open WIP PRs with incomplete code. Open discussions beforehand. Also, repeated questions and similar problems can be retrieved from the chat / comments history. Now, for early designs, spikes, initial research on an epic/hard tasks, needs some sync comms, followed by some asynchronous comments and questions. Even things like "yesterday we discussed during a call x, y and z, and we agreed on w. it still holds up? In this case, I will use the strategy N to develop the solution, please comment back if you changed your mind". It helps me a lot, and the people that I asked about this kind of message are heavily positive on it, because it's neutral enough and consolidates the agreement. Then after a few weeks working close to someone (same team, for instance), I can make that phrase shorter, because we established a protocol. Now that said, under my new contract, the entire team is almost silent on chat and everything is a direct call with 4 people on avg. I'm wrecked today because of 5 consecutive 30min~1h meetings to sync information yesterday. |