Tools for Software Development Project while working with remote development teams
By: Yugasa Software Labs
Tags: Outsourcing, Freelancers, Remote Working, Startup, Outsourcing Company India

Decided to hire an external team for software development of your company? Wondering what are the tools you will need to have so that you can efficiently manage your remote development team? Read through this article and you will understand all that you require to make your business successful with

the excellent tools that you can use to administrate your remote development team.

Communication Tools — Skype, Hangout, Slack, WhatsApp

Communication is the basic need of a company, more so if you have a team to manage remotely. It is very crucial that all the necessary information is communicated to each and every member of the remote team from the headquarters so that there is are no problems in functioning due to

communication gaps.

There are a lot of ways or platforms that you can use to communicate with your remote team these days. If you have the number of each team member, in this case the easiest way would be to form a

Whats App group and start chatting and making calls as often as needed. If it is required for the team to operate with sharing your computer screen or by video calls then Skype would be the best option. If only video calls suffice the need then you can also consider hangouts from Google. Slack is another communication tool that is slowly gaining popularity for its features of integrated many third party services and support into it. It not only offers group chatting but it also allows you to make project specific teams with in it. File sharing and searching the previous communication or shared assets is quite easy in Slack. All these communication tools make sure smooth functioning of the remote team.

Project management Tools — Redmine, Asana, BaseCamp and JIRA

Project management with no second thought is one of the most important areas for a company while developing a software product. It needs more attention when you have to manage a remote development team because you have to ensure that all the features of project management, i.e.

planning/scheduling, collaborations, documentation and evaluation happen with ease. Just like the tools for communication, there are a variety of options available for project management as well. Some examples for the same from the top charts would be

Redmine, you can learn more about Redmine here: https://www.redmine.org/

Asana: https://asana.com/

BaseCamp: https://basecamp.com/

JIRA: https://jira.atlassian.com/

Code Sharing Tools — BitBucket, GITHub

The most important factor for the development team and the headquarters is how they can share the

codes that are developed by each development team. It is very important that it is done in a very secure yet easy to handle way so that the process doesn’t become cumbersome to both the parties. It is not just about code sharing but is very much needed for code versioning when it comes to multiple developers working on a single project. If people are working from multiples locations then use of such code versioning tools become more significant. Tools like GITHub and Bitbucket ensure that teams don’t waste time in just sharing the codes developed by them instead of actually concentrating on the development of these codes. Both these tools are in the top of the charts for code sharing between teams.

Reporting tools — Emails for daily status reporting

A development team or for that matter any team should have a reporting structure. They should all

have to send progress status reports to stake holders and product owners. The best way to share such information is to send emails daily, informing as to:

what did a developer do in whole day

are there any bottlenecks in the current task

what is planned for next day to work on

queries section and special notes section

Deploying the suggested tools or other similar tools will make project management and team coordination much easier while working remotely. These basic tools ensure that you can manage a

remote development team efficiently.

We at Yugasa endeavor our best to deploy all such development and project management practices

which bring transparency in project execution and increase team efficiency while working for clients across the globe. To discuss your project needs, feel free to reach us at contact@yugasa.com

. We shall be more than happy to assist you for any of your product development.

Originally published at yugasa.com on June 4, 2018.