Chris Moyer shares " When you're in a remote working situation, the constant communication and whiteboard mock-ups that are normal to an office environment become complicated. Fortunately, there are cloud and Web tools available that can help with this issue. While there are many tools for each situation, these are the applications I've found helpful in my life as a remote development manager and programmer.
Flowdock for team collaboration
Flowdock is a Web application designed for collaboration that provides developers with a central location to communicate with other developers and check in on their work during the day. Flowdock was purchased in February 2013 by Rally Software, a Software as a Service application lifecycle management tool provider.
A chat room with extras, Flowdock integrates with other services, including
trouble ticketmanagement systems,
wikis and even Twitter and RSS feeds. Flowdock is completely Web-accessible and available via several mobile applications. It allows you to provide that "water cooler" atmosphere, but the caveat is that the entire team has to use it daily for it to pay off.
There is no one super-tool that can manage all situations.
At Newstex, we use Flowdock to monitor development team members' activity, and we require them to remain logged into it during all billing hours. Flowdock helps me and my team members to do the following:
Keep a complete history of the project, reducing the time spent on documentation
Tag and search conversations, so one can easily go back in time and find out what was decided to do about that pesky little bug or feature request from a client
Integrate with Twitter to monitor social media to find people talking about the company and even to make replies directly to them or comment to your users first
Integrate with continuous integration and code repository systems to give all developers a single dashboard where they can see what's going on in the workplace
In short, for Newstex, Flowdock is essential to high visibility within the remote workforce.
Skype, Google Hangouts and VoIP for better conference calls
Skype and
voice-over-IP (VoIP) are key communication tools for Newstex. We've traditionally used Skype, now owned by Microsoft, for all our voice calls, but recently have been switching to using VoIP services to provide us with a clearer calling experience.
To give each development team member
parity, make sure your conversations feel like you're in the same room. Usually, traditional phones can't do that. For VoIP, we use
OnSIP, a VoIP cloud service, and give everyone their own extension so they can be reached. VoIP's high-definition voice capabilities allow us to have easy-to-hear, one-to-one, ad hoc meetings and scheduled conference calls. While emails may work for detailing instructions, much more can be communicated in quick, real-time conversations with people. Think of these calls as a replacement for walking over to someone's office and having a quick chat about something you're working on. For few more tools and complete story see
here.
