Outsourcing an extended team of developers is one way of growing the technical resources at your company. The talent pool is deep right now. Remote work has taken hold despite a sudden, massive migration. Therefore, the potential for savings is clear.
Remote Development Teams: How do they work?
Remote development teams work as technology service providers. Companies seek technology partners who can elevate them and add value to their organization. They move away from the objectives of traditional outsourcing – cutting costs, delivering on time and communicating across time zones. Disruptive technologies like cloud and automation are transforming outsourcing, whirling innovation, speed to market, enhancing user experience, improving performance, and control cost.
Role: What are the Job Responsibilities of Remote Developers?
People who work remotely need to be self-starters. Without the need to delegate every detail, they self-organize their work, manage their time and communicate, initiate and face challenging clients – as and when they encounter them. In addition to covering the languages, frameworks, and tools, they have to apply a pseudo-code approach to resolve problems.
Issues: What challenges do the remote development teams face?
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- Different Time Zones across the globe;
- Barriers in communication;
- Cultures, languages and practices differ globally;
- Demographics can impact development teams;
- Several round-ups and iterations to get to the root cause;
- Lack of post-deployment product viability, product support, and maintenance which they seldom consider as their task;
Pros: What are the benefits of hiring remote developers?
These indicators elevate an organization and gain a competitive advantage. Organizations focus on building a talented and dedicated team of developers after assessing the hiring needs of their customers to deliver the best value as an offshore partner. Remote development teams are an asset for organizations that eagerly recruit skillful people at a minimal cost.
Considerations: What should you consider while hiring remote software developers?
Organizations need to consider the offshore route to find the best talent – geography, language, time difference before determining anything.
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- Some organizations look for a specific skill, while others need a complete product development team for undertaking their project. Either way, there are certain best practices that they should follow while hiring an offshore development team.
- Narrow down your search based on geography, skill-set, previous work or client testimonials.
- Ensure effective, open, and secure communication channels – Define the project requirements effectively and ease the overall communication process;
- Secure the right collaboration tools and methodologies to ensure transparency, agility, efficiency in product development. i.e.
- Remote Slack, Skype, Zoom, Jira, Azure DevOps, and Asana for morning scrum meetings
- CRM tracking, assigning action items – Odoo
- Daily status review using different tools –Odoo, Gsuite
- Status reports and project management using tools like Jira and Zoho
- Define the timelines to complete multiple sprints in the project. Break down the problem into clear goals on a weekly or daily basis. Ensure your team adheres to it.
- Overcome any language and cultural challenges and try achieving common grounds in communicating.
Scope: What are the best practices for remote work teams?
The development process includes goals, priorities, requirements for development teams and other stakeholders. Quarterly planning meetings are difficult for remote development teams as these can be less productive.
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- A best practice plan should add, estimate, and prioritize features and stories to backlog every sprint. Best teams aim for MVPs, architecture and dependencies. It requires a series of prints and backlogs to get through.
- Make use of white-boarding tools like vanilla whiteboards, Miro and Creately to brainstorm and document solutions. These offer numerous templates to start with collaborative diagramming; Also, wireframing tools like Balsamiq, Mogups, Adobe XD, and others.
- Additionally, they should use Gliffy, Lucidchart, and Visio diagramming tools.
- Invest time to innovate with agile POC, Scrum, Data Science, and cloud.
- Make use of low code and citizen development platforms. Try understanding different implementation options that can lead to new capabilities faster.
- Testing is essential to justify that the application releases meet functional requirements, performance standards, security requirements, and compliance obligations. Consider continuous testing if you have CI/CD pipelines, where the pipeline triggers a subset of the automated tests.
- Also, robust testing requires establishing shift-left testing strategies in the development process, as the barriers to fixing bugs during deployment and production phases are significantly higher for remote teams. Additionally, make use of shift-left security and feature flags while introducing new capabilities. To make things better – ‘remote teams’ must focus on improving the quality of deployments than increasing deployment frequencies.
- Automate the low-risk change management. It does not necessarily need to be time-consuming, but approval from all the board members for low-risk application deployments is pertinent.
- Seek other in-house developers’ support via recommendations, questions and concerns, perspectives on remote work, remote development, and remote deployment.
Conclusion
Top software development companies gain insights into brainstorming, innovating, and solution building leading to broader opportunities and challenges of the business by following development best practices.