To find the best developers, sometimes it makes more sense to commission work to external people who are situated outside of your organisation and network. Keeping tabs on development isn’t easy. When people are not based locally, timelines can go astray and it’s not always easy to keep track of build bugs and make sure the right person fixes outstanding issues.

For that reason, we rely on collaboration tools. These enable developers to work on a document or code, update, then commit the change back to the server. However, this still has issues. If a software build contains bugs, more than one developer might attempt to fix the code at the same time.

Gobby is a cross-platform tool that enables developers to import source code or a document and edit at the same time. Each user can be assigned a colour code that enables them to see the changes made by other people. Users can chat between themselves and also work on more than document at any one point in time.

There are versions for Windows (the download here), Linux and Mac OS X, which is not a native application. Developers and users can work on the same document and code, irrespective of operating system or location.