Productivity Tools for Every Remote Development Team

Introduction

There are more and more developers working remotely and collaborating from different locations all over the world. And this trend will only increase! Statistics and surveys show that nearly 35% business leaders plan to move 50% of their full-time workforce to remote work by 2020.

Building dev teams remotely is an obvious trend. Remote work increases employees’ productivity and is cost-effective in contrast to working in an office.

Team leader and CTOs know how hard it is to build the right team – especially remotely. It’s all about great communication, a common goal, and professionalism. It’s important to help developers feel as if they were sitting behind a desk in your company, make friends with technology and choose some tools that’ll help you to manage the progress of work remotely, too.

Here we present you some of the best online tools available to help you keep everything under control. To learn more, just scroll down and read about software that will:

• support you and your team in project management,
• ensure that your developers are on track,
• assist in reaching business goals and performance levels,
• help to develop team culture

We’ve divided the tools into the following groups: productivity, chatting, project management, and team culture.

Productivity

Todoist

Todoist is a great to-do app to manage every task or process from start to finish. It’s simple and user-friendly and has a great deal of customizable options at the same time. It can be easily shared between team members to monitor their current responsibilities.

iDoneThis

iDoneThis is a very nice tool for teams working remotely that offers check-ins and progress reports to boost productivity. Their slogan is I Done This is making teams better and that’s the main goal. Teams can easily keep up with each other’s progress.

Atlassian Stash

Atlassian Stash is a simple tool for keeping developers productive when working with Git. Everyone knows that the management of Git repositories and permissions can be tiresome. Thanks to Stash, developers can structure repos easily in a friendly interface. The repos are organized into Projects which is an easy way for developers to contribute to code that is being used in a given project.

Chatting

Slack

Slack is a must-have tool now. It’s very intuitive and offers a lot of options to diversify and simplify any team’s communication. Slack has useful chatbots and a wide range of integrations that will allow you to decrease the number of e-mails for sure.

HipChat

HipChat is another cool tool, thanks to which the communication between team members runs smoothly. Its integration with other Atlassian tools, like Jira, optimizes every team’s work and discussion over a project.

PukkaTeam

PukkaTeam is a great communicator that helps mimic the office atmosphere. Users can feel as if they were sitting in one room together. PukkaTeam is a video-chat that unites the team with one a unique feature – it lets people take selfie screenshots every few minutes (or only when you want to). This is a funny way of keeping in touch with the rest of the team and connecting visually with them.

Project Management

Asana

Asana is a tool for teams to track work and get & analyze results. You can manage your task or a whole project from the start, including conversations and notifications, which is a perfect solution for people working remotely!

JIRA

JIRA is a great solution for managing both dev and marketing teams. With it you can monitor sprints and a project’s progress (you have due dates and task statuses). Assign projects to individuals and allow the whole team to provide feedback, support each other and control the workflow, or even manage the technical debt. It’s a great “issue tracker” for sound managers and CTOs.

Trello

Trello is a very easy and friendly free tool for managing tasks and projects. It is designed to resemble a board or a clipboard that can be filled with tasks and assigned team members. Thanks to Trello, you can prioritize sessions remotely. There’s a great “virtual whiteboard” to start the remote brainstorming process.

Team Culture

Every Time Zone

Every Time Zone is a super-easy and highly desired tool that shows developers their colleagues’ time zone! Solve problems with waiting for a message from a remote developer who is in the middle of his REM phase. This tool solves problems with scheduling meetings and communicating on time. Also, you can keep track of the current time in different cities.

Screenhero

Of course, the best explanation is the one given face-to-face. Often screenshots, gifs, and infographics aren’t enough, especially for developers who work remotely. The answer is Screenhero, which lets you make a video call with screen sharing options. You can chat and have multiple mouse cursors to control what’s going on with the shared project.

Donut.ai

Donut.ai – this tool with a sweet and funny name connects people over Slack. You can introduce a new employee to the rest of a team or arrange a meeting of random developers to encourage them to exchange knowledge and cooperate. Donut breaks down the barriers to introducing, asking for help or integrating.

Final word

Now you can try these tools and check whether they’re useful for you or your remote team. Always try to encourage productivity in your teams when working on a project.