4 Tools for Agile Developers Who Work Remotely

You can’t deny the fact that team collaboration is the next step forward, for any developer of any kind. It’s no longer viable to just sit and program away all by yourself, especially if you found yourself in situation where you’re doing a lot of remote work.

Agile development is all about being able to communicate at all times, to never have the feeling that you’re disconnected from your fellow developers, even if the mileage difference between you goes into the thousands. This is what the internet is for, and this is why so many businesses and companies are trying to bridge the gap.

Even though agile development is very popular, and there certainly are a lot of opinions and takes on it, the most important thing to pay attention to, is the concern as to whether agile is going to make your team successful, especially if you have one, two or more than that people working from remote locations. It has been done, and it can be done. Though you might need some tools to help you along the way.

In this post we’re taking a look at a definite blueprint of tools that could help ANY small or medium sized team to achieve their desired goals.

1. GitHub

First up we have the most important code collaboration tool on the web, which is slowly becoming the global epicenter of all things related to working on code either as an individual, or a business. Microsoft, Google, and just about everyone else is starting to move their codebases to GitHub. It’s definitely an exhilarating experience for the devs at GitHub! Lately, I find myself finding tutorials, snippets and all kinds of other related code stuff, not just projects or full-scale products.

2. Confluence

I’d go as far as saying that Confluence is like a little mini-Facebook version of your own team network. It allows for easy, non-disturbed, communication between team members on the latest issues, ideas or anything else for that matter. Create ideas and have people discuss them, upload files and have your team review them, give your team members tasks to complete, or simply share links that everyone should read. A very versatile, and user-friendly application.

3. Jabber

Skype? Forget about it. Jabber is the perfect collaboration tool that helps to provide instant messaging services, voice, voice messaging tools, integrated video calling, and a lot more. Jabber isn’t just a video-sharing tool, you can easily create full-blown conference calls and meetings using Jabber, and it works just as well on mobile as it does on desktop. This integrated collaboration experience works with both on premise and cloud-based collaboration architectures.

4. HipChat

Technically, you should be using all of these tools together, to really accelerate the progress of how your team members are communicating with each other, at any given time. The icing on the cake is going to be HipChat, a persistency-based team collaboration and chatting tool that only you and your co-workers are able to access to. It’s very mobile, which means that you can always stay up to date with the latest happenings either on a project, or the team as a whole.

HipChat is a hosted IM and group chat service for companies and teams. No ads, obscure screen names, or failed file transfers. Collaborate in real-time with colleagues and clients in persistent chat rooms. Thousands of startups, small business, and virtual teams use HipChat every day.

Conclusion: –
If you’d like us to see expand on this topic in the future, please let us know in the comment section. I’ve tried to wrap up what seems to be the bread and butter for any developer team out there, it’s possible that your variety of tools is going to differ in flavor — because lets be honest, we all work on different projects, and we all have different needs. All I know is that a lot of these tools can also be combined together with each other, so in case a particular member of the crew is keen on using only his favorite tools to perform the work he does. Though that’s a very rare case.