Group Chat: The Best Way to Stress Out Your Team (basecamp.com)

Great points. Unfortunately, some people doesn't or just don't want understand async communication flow :)

We basically have three channels per team.

  - an 'ATC' channel for communicating outside the team
  - a dev channel for team members and honorary members
  - an offtopic channel for chat

All three are mostly async with new code reviews/reminders posted to the dev channel. There are other forms of communication but these are the day-to-day ones. Any significant discussions/findings get documented elsewhere.

This simple process works pretty well, but I guess it's because people follow the expected conventions which may take a while to develop.