I would say the single most important rule that we ever put in place for our team which is completly distributed is that everything goes in the ticket system. N

I would say the single most important rule that we ever put in place for our team which is completly distributed is that everything goes in the ticket system. No matter how small if it requires work, it goes into the ticket system. This ensures that there is a ticket out there that is being tracked, the project cannot be considered complete until all tickets are either dealt with or backlogged. Having a process built around a ticket system is instrumental to a process where things don't fall off the radar. A good deal of the ticket systems like JIRA integrate with the major IDE's, and most source control repositories can be configured to require a commit note. Many of the plugins integrate with source control to update the ticket at the same time you commit. Further some will even branch and merge just by clicking on a ticket and setting it's state to open. The point being with a little modeling of your process you can implement defect and feature tracking in a way that works with the natural flow of development. Doing so will patch a lot of the areas where information is leaking and not being captured.