7 Tools for Remote Teams in 2020
Don’t stay behind; Enjoy the best tools for remote teamwork.
The latest Coronavirus outbreak has again stressed the need for productive and effective tools that enable remote distributed work.
Such tools are meant to overcome such of the most difficult challenges of working remotely as a distributed team: Verbal and Written Communication, Task management, Collaboration, Visual reviews, Team handshakes, Brainstorming, Release Management and more.
The list below is made of some very powerful tools that can help any team successfully cross the distributed challenge. The list isn’t ranked, it’s just a laydown of a toolset that we use at our company and that can empower your team to be productive while working remotely to build software together.
Please feel free to comment and add/comment on anything! Cheers.
1. GitHub / GitLab / Bitbucket
The platforms for Git-based projects built in a distributed workflow.
Git, at its core, is distributed to allow great flexibility in remote developers' workflows. With this distribution, everyone can consume and contribute.
You all know GitHub so no need to introduce it. In short, GitHub provides 3 things: Hosting for Git repos, Pull-requests and added features (stars etc). Each is a bulls-eye when it comes to remote work, as you can manage issues in the same place you manage your code. That’s all you need really.
But, GitHub is much more than that. It’s the focal point for your engineering team. It’s where the code is, where Git versions are managed and so on. As such, it’s where different developers work together.
When working as a distributed R&D team, GitHub is where everyone comes together through code. In fact, GitHub itself is a distributed team that works with GitHub. Evert developers can fork, clone, merge and contribute code to common projects while building together.
You can also choose GitHub alternatives such as GitLab or Bitbucket — which have their pros and cons. Here’s a short rundown. No matter which platform you choose, make sure your distributed workflow is effective as can be.
2. Bit
The component collaboartion platform for frontend/product teams.
Bit.dev is a popular developer platform for components.
It’s where frontend and products team collaborate on their components to build apps. Much like Git, Bit is an open-source tool of a distributed nature. With Bit, teams can turn their project's components into managed building blocks that can be easily used and update across many projects.
With Bit.dev, remote frontend teams get one central hub where all their components are hosted, updated and can be used in different projects.
They can easily share new components, find existing ones, visualize and play with examples, and use the components (package or code) in new projects.
For distributed and remote frontend teams this is very important, as it gives them the power to collaborate and build together through components. Since all components are also visualized, it also streamlines the workflow over UI elements used and updated in different pages and applications.
When building with reusable and shared components, your team can save time, easily update parts of your app and ensure UI consistency.
Having all your components available online, and effectively sharing components between projects and people, makes your team better.
> Try it: https://bit.dev
3. Zeplin
The visual designer-developer handshake.
Zeplin comes in to aid in one of the most complicated handshakes: designer and developer. And, it can help a lot.
A designer can upload designs from Sketch or Figma to Zeplin, where the developer can get helpful information for turning them into code. With the recently released connected components feature, you can even point Zeplin assets to your code components (soon- Bit.dev integration!).
Zeplin create one place where designers can “stage” their designs for developers to implement and where both work together in one platform. When working in a remote team, such a tool becomes all that more important by easing the challenge of visual collaboration over UIs. We use it.
4. Zoom
The VoIP platform that mostly works. And, you can just dial-in.
We can sum up Zoom like this: It’s VoIP that really works. And, it lets you dial-in on any call from your phone. Or any other device. That’s useful.
Zoom conference calls allow multiple attendees to log in to the same call from wherever they are in the world. While this is essential for remote teams to conduct daily tasks, it’s also useful for full company updates and connections.
In a distributed workflow for a fully-remote team, Zoom is an effective way to make meetings happen and give people a feeling of socialization if they are working from their living room sofa. And, did I say it works?
5. Slack / Microsoft teams
Instant team communicaton and everything.
Slack is a collaboration hub that can replace email to help you and your team work together via written messages. It’s designed to support the way people naturally work together, so you can collaborate with people online. It marked one of the most rapid growths of any product, and for a good reason.
Its main advantages include ease-of-use, many useful integrations to tools you already use, a dev-first approach, bots, code-sharing and more. We use it with much pleasure, although it did not replace conventional emails.
An alternative to Slack can be Microsoft teams. As more organizations move to work with the office 365 suit, teams became an increasingly popular product that integrates well into the Microsoft ecosystem.
You can find short comparisons between Slack and Teams here, here and here. Feel free to compare before you choose, based on your needs.
6. Jira / Asana / Monday
Everyone has a favorite task management tool.
Task-driven project management is a fine art that changes from person to person. Still, choosing the right tooling for the job can go a long way in making your team productive and achieving your goals.
There are many options, so I’ve rounded up 3 favorites (compare).
The first is Monday.com, a friendly project management platform used by organizations like Uber, Ebay and Adobe. Other than the regular task management features, it provides useful automation for routines, efficient high-level management views and a great experience for collaboration.
Asana is also a great tool that I personally like, mainly because it’s simple. Everything is straight forward, so it takes about 10 seconds to open a task, assign it to someone and add it as a dependency of another task. The only problem is that at some scale point it becomes harder to stay in control.
Jira is a project/issue management tool by Atlassian. It’s used by companies like Airbnb, Spotify, and Cisco. Some find Jira a bit more enterprise-oriented, although it provides low competitive pricing. Try it out for yourself.
Here’s a short comparison:
7. Trello
Plan your high level roadmap of everything
Atlassian’s Trello is about one thing: planning.
It basically provides boards, lists, and cards that put together give you the power to plan stuff. And, do it with other people. And, keep track. That’s really all there is to planing. To make the experience smoother, it also provides bot integration so that you can automate routines and info.
We use it alongside our task-management tools for high-level planning for roadmaps for the product, business and more. When working remotely, it’s very healthy for everyone to have one source of truth on strategy.
Bonus: Tmate
tmate offers instant terminal sharing. Why such a basic tool is listed here? well because when you work remotely, the ability to share one’s terminal can save hours of work. Put together with an SSH key, it helps people solve each other’s problems, get in sync and work together. Just a useful tip.
