How To Effectively Manage Your Remote Development Team

Depending on your needs, you may be fully happy with one full-stack engineer. A typical productive software developer team consists of 5–7 people. This size allows every team member to be fully immersed in project details and understand the scope, challenges, and possible solutions.

COVID-19 has shown the world what organizations are capable of. Just days after the disease caused by the new coronavirus was officially declared a pandemic, many have managed to get more than 85% of their employees to work remotely. Technical interviews allow you to go deeper and learn about the candidate’s specific skills and professional knowledge. Usually, interviews consist of a set of questions that are specific to the role and seniority you are hiring for and verify that they can walk the walk. But Trio developers strive to work more closely with your company than other outsourcing agencies and fully understand the needs of your project. Unfortunately, things aren’t all black and white, and you might not have the resources to go about building a remote team.

Meet with the remote team a few times a week and use the other days for a local stand-up. Similarly, a stand-up doesn’t have to be a morning routine, either. Whatever time User interface design of day is most convenient for everyone involved is the best time of day. It’s important in any program, especially agile programs, to have solid rapport across the team.

Remote Software Development

Instead of tracking every step and giving away minor tasks, teach members of your dedicated team to find solutions and organize their work on their own. Also, set defined priorities and focus on long-term goals rather than on day-to-day goals. Check out this video where Matt DeCoursey, Co-founder of Full Scale, explains how we can remote software development tools help build a successful team for your business. If you’re managing a global workforce, the diversity could also bring potential language and cultural challenges. These barriers may affect how employees engage with each other and how they accomplish tasks. As a result, this may lead to conflicting work habits, values, and customs.

They’re fine with embracing new tasks that require going out of their comfort zone. According to Buffer, the biggest problem for 22% of remote workers is unplugging after work. The flexibility of remote work sometimes makes it difficult to shut off from a never-ending list of tasks and make use of free time. Try establishing mentoring relationships between senior and junior developers. A mentor and a mentee should have regular online meetings and dedicated time for knowledge sharing.

You can check regional ratings for all popular technologies to see which countries excel at them at websites such as HackerRank. Perhaps, qualified devs for the technology of your choice are rare in your home country so you may have to search abroad. Information management within the organization, such as access levels for different employees, regular password update requirements, etc.

According to Reed Hastings, Netflix’s CEO, your company’s core is not about strict corporate policies or hard work. Instead, people are the priority of the company and trust is at the core of corporate culture. This approach includes total transparency within the company, feedback loops, no official vacation and salary policies.

Use Continuous Agile Planning To Maintain Roadmaps And Backlogs

Even with the cost-saving benefits of remote development companies — to avert risks, always discuss the nuances of engagement models to find common ground with partner companies. Full-time remote developers are obligated to be on your side, at least during work hours. Also, it goes without saying that developers with poor soft skills tend don’t last very long on a team. When you write a job description, divide all of the responsibilities into succinct bullet points. The more specifications you are able to provide, the better candidates will be able to understand your expectations and their potential duties in the remote team.

• However, teams that rely on Zoom should be aware of certain limitations.
• Development teams should also use diagramming tools to plan architecture and implementations.
• And with team augmentation, your range of options expands even further.
• And make sure you have a finish time in mind and try to stick to it.
• A typical productive software developer team consists of 5–7 people.

Routine kills morale faster than anything, especially if the work doesn’t serve much point. Automate everything that can be automated and make sure that your team has fun working.

Trends In Remote Working

For example, at nCube we set up a typical tech team in 2-4 weeks, which obviously takes less time than building a home-based squad. Pipelines turn the team build, test, verification, and release process into consistent and repeatable automation. Thanks to collaborative software, video conferencing tools, and project management SaaS, there are no longer barriers that once required the team to be on-premises. And when properly managed, a remote team can do wonders for your project.

They’ll ask questions, they’ll suggest their vision on the best way to organize sprints, etc. And even if their ideas aren’t great all the time, they’ll spark the thinking process in other team members. And these are the developers you’ll need to hire for your software development team.

They’re not only an effective way to build rapport and spread culture across the team, but it is also a great way for employees to experience a different culture. Most people still think of Zoom video conferencing as scheduled time. Creating a culture of using video chat for spontaneous casual conversation takes time. Also, use instant messaging tools like Slack for quick questions.

Of course, establishing a trusting relationship from day one and fostering an environment of personal responsibility is always best. If you manage to do that, you won’t need to bother with time tracking. However, if you do feel the need to track work time, there are plenty of virtual time tracking software tools. They allow you to see what tasks your remote team members are working on (in real-time) and which websites or apps they’re using. We must build trust in our remote teams based on mutual understanding and respect. Encourage openness with weekly remote lunch events and virtual coffee breaks.

Trend #3: Managers & Executives To Join Remote Workforce

Plus, there will be times when you’ll interact directly with team members, from Business Analysts to Designers, so they can receive input and direction from you. Okay, so you’ve decided to use a remote development team to build your digital product. Be sure to read the sections that follow to learn how to select your candidates and thoroughly vet them.

Using the right tools for your project is crucial for successful completion. Cloud-based tools are much more efficient while choosing collaboration tools. Agile methodology work best for remote or offshore development based projects. It ensures transparency, agility and efficiency in product development.

That means that you will put a team together – member by member – as if collecting seashells on the coast. DevOps engineers are reliable for the automation of product development processes. For example, they prepare development quality analysis, test automation, and control tools. They also track the work of all development environments and tools. At the start and end of each meeting, don’t forget to give your team compliments. Make sure to explain what exactly you like about the course of the project.

Freelance marketplaces help build trust between employers and freelancers via features like rankings and testimonials. Freelancers are easy to terminate if the relationship isn’t working out and do not have the right to collect unemployment insurance or sue for harassment or discrimination. Of course, you want to make sure you hire the right developers in the first place, but it’s good to plan for the worst scenario.

You will see that your remote developers will gladly follow a clearly outlined process of building, testing, and documentation. Two other focus areas for remote development teams include shift-left security and using feature flags when introducing new capabilities. The best practice here is that remote development teams should focus more on improving the quality of deployments than increasing deployment frequencies. One of those application options should include using a low-code platform. If you have always worked in the same building with your team — you are in for a rather rude awakening. However, if you persevere and learn to manage remote teams, you will gain incredible benefits.

Jira is rather intimidating at first sight, but the actual developers will often need only the Kanban board functionality — which is pretty intuitive and simple. Moreover, it integrates nicely into the Atlassian infrastructure and has great synergy with Slack. To the most pragmatic managers, it might seem like an unnecessary waste of time. However, having good team morale often results in faster, better development. Of course, it is a bare minimum, and you can leverage such 1-on-1 meetings further to learn more about the employee’s hobbies and personal life. However, even these three questions will alleviate a lot of issues that might otherwise go unnoticed. Live face-to-face meetings play an important role in building a solid rapport.