Software development strategies

Companies might be working as fully remote organizations, or with some team members working from home and some working from an office. Thousands of managers and team leaders have to unexpectedly manage remote teams. These teams might be located in the same city or spread out across time zones.

Handling newly remote teams could be tough, especially when they have never done so before and have little time to make the switch. I hope this rundown helps software team leaders who find themselves managing remote teams to set up for success. For any IT company, strategizing and organizing a workable remote team has become crucial. It ensures that productivity remains up to the mark and each team member complies with delivery timelines. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to creating an effective remote environment.

The remote strategy has to be a carefully planned decision that is driven by the desire for the team to work in absolute tandem. Outsourcing in software development has become pretty common due to the availability of fail-safe, cloud-based collaborative tools. Remote teams require the right set of collaborative tools, ensuring every member remains on the same page to execute tasks without a physical manager overseeing them.

Collaboration tools can be conveniently divided into two types: text-based collaboration tools and audio-video communication tools. Text is the most-used method of communication. It offers the advantage of being able to index and search messages instantaneously. Slack is one such collaborative tool that merges instant messaging, text messaging, and email into one.

It is available in mobile and desktop versions so that remote teams can coordinate wherever they are. Face-to-face personal meetings are yet to lose their charm despite some inherent disadvantages. Sometimes it is better to be able to explain things in a more approachable way. With Skype, a collaboration tool that is immensely popular across the world, you can make unlimited voice and video calls either one-to-one or in groups, share files and code, and send instant messages.

It comes in all three varieties—tablet, computer, and mobile. Task management utilities such as JIRA, Intercom, Monday, and Trello allow remote teams to set up work assignment priorities and follow up with tasks. These collaborative software programs are critical in structuring your team and enhancing overall productivity.

Managing a remote team comes with serious challenges, not least of which is leading and organizing people across backgrounds, cultures, time zones, and countries. Many managers never have a chance to meet their team members in person. This results in unconscious overcorrecting by way of micromanagement to ease the tension of not being in control of the task. Micromanaging hinders this, resulting in dissatisfied employees and a toxic environment. Some managers take the approach of the perfectionist, leading to an unending trail of emails, rechecks, and revisions.

This also causes tasks to pile up and makes it harder to meet deadlines. Remote employees are by necessity practical and disciplined and can take responsibility for their performance, work, and actions. It is not a good idea to excessively supervise team members by continuously prodding them. As a team leader, first of all, reflect on where your micromanaging urges are coming from. No one ever wants to deliver bad news.

Our clients appreciate honesty and when we need to cut a feature, for example, telling them sooner than later along with a reason for the delay makes a difference. The nature of software development, especially in a culture where we work with remote employees and closely with clients, is that things can change quickly.

We often assume someone will be available when we need them. To be effective, we rely on the communications that are planned and scheduled so everyone who needs to be involved is available and ready.

Tools like Slack are great for filling the gaps, but it can be dangerous and ineffective to assume those you need are around or able to drop everything when you need something. We utilize several tools for continuous communication, both internally and with our clients.

These, along with meetings and regular updates, keep everyone in the loop and on the same page. Project information is readily available and the entire team has confidence in our ability to make that final delivery on time and within budget.

One of the most important tools we use for internal communications is Slack. We have a mix of remote, sometimes remote, and in-office employees and having a tool that allows us to quickly communicate and collaborate with others enables us to function as a team.

All internal discussions, links to meeting notes, and other items are shared here. We also do weekly check-ins on Friday through Slack in order to provide clients with an update. At Envy, we saw a need for a client hub and created our own Client Dashboard. As the project progresses, we also link to completed wireframes, designs, and staging environments. While we utilize several tools, we make it easy for clients to have a single place to go for everything relating to the project.

Basecamp is an effective communication tool and does a great job with threaded project discussions. We utilize Basecamp to share meeting notes, post deliverables, and to initiate or respond to feature-related discussions. Working with a software development team, GitHub is a necessity. Hence, they would determine ways to go and what will be included in the product development process.

This step closely links with the above activities that the software development team would check the available inventory and resources. If you hire an experienced vendor, which has done similar projects before, they will apply the previous tasks to your projects to save time and budget. Additionally, reusable tools are believed to not taken bugs and lag. Besides, it could also reduce the testing process. The four above steps would provide you adequate information before any development effort has been placed.

Accordingly, you have documents describing what you need and what you have in relation to the possibility of building your software solutions.

Hence, at this time, you need to define clearly a list of tasks. You should make sure that what should be done first and what needs to execute later. Our clients commonly divided their projects into small phases, started with MVP. Then, depending on customer feedback, another improved version will be developed. This strategy becomes more popular since it speeds up the time of product launching. After having a profound checklist for the upcoming project, you can finalize the software development strategies that would be suitable.

Basically, strategy decisions would be placed based on project scale and scope. Commonly, the software development team will initially deliver an MVP with regularly three screens.

As mention above, you need a detailed requirement document for your project, including deadlines, technologies, and budget. In which, this information would be unchanged across the development period. Accordingly, it needs to be defined clearly with careful consideration. Software solutions should keep up with evolution across industries.

However, whatever the flexible methodology applied, you should keep in mind that:. Recently, automation and mobile devices expectedly shape the future in the IT industry. Your upcoming software development strategies should not ignore those novel standards. Today is the edges of information and digital information, that the software developed should serve the real need to sustainably alive.

Most dedicated software development teams currently leverage agile scrum methodology in delivering their services. They believed in its effectiveness and efficiency, which benefits both clients and the team by accelerating the development process.

When the dedicated development team decides to apply the Waterfall strategy, they will strictly follow a detailed plan. Whereby every step has been clarified with no uncertainties. In Waterfall strategies, developers rarely change any minor part of the software development plan , that they follow step-by-step execution. We use this information to address the inquiry and respond to the question.

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