A Guide to Running a Remote Development Team in 2021

You’ll have to figure out some strategies for getting around this issue, like finding the best time in the morning or evening or staggered meeting times. If you’re in a hotbed of developers who you think can handle your project, you probably don’t need to go remote. If that talent isn’t physically close to you, or you need a specialist with a rare skill set, then a remote team might be your only choice. Besides, these are not all the benefits you get from having a dedicated team, but the main ones. Hence, if these advantages seem to be substantial for your company, let’s cover the cases when a remote team is the best fit for your business model.

When you’re managing a remote team, it’s important to establish guidelines for communication, collaboration, and privacy controls, and make sure everyone understands and follows them. Remote work is now a big part of the modern work environment, especially in today’s post-COVID era. According to a 2022 StackOverflow Survey, 42.98% of almost 59,000 software developers work remotely. Related to the above, with good developers in such high demand, you may find it hard to attract the right people for your development team. They need to have the right mix of hard and soft skills, and you need to have the budget to offer them pay at a level they’ll accept.

Time management in a remote development team

Turing works closely with you to understand your problems and desired outcomes, and offers a clear path to a solution. It’s perfect for team meetings, code reviews, and anything else you need to have a face-to-face about. NDAs (non-disclosure agreements) and contracts are an essential part of remote work. These will protect your business and ensure that your intellectual property is safe.

Inquire with current or prior customers about their vendor experience. Work processes have to be meticulously planned out “from the ground up”. To avoid misunderstandings, be as thorough as possible in your written communication. The exploration phase is the initial stage in establishing a working connection with an experienced team. Time and materials contracts enable the business to adjust the amount of work, review materials or plans, change the focus, or modify features following the project executions.

Since the team is fully remote, you have to utilize video conferencing or text chat software like Slack to hold a stand-up meeting. This will allow for quick feedback loops on your progress throughout the day while also providing valuable face-to-face interaction with remote employees. A well-run stand-up meeting should take no more than 15 minutes so that participants can still get their work done afterward. Read more software development best practices and project management tutorials. Low-code development tools are a great way to speed up your product development.

Keep repeating your company’s story

You will broaden your technological horizons by obtaining access to cutting-edge knowledge. With a specialized team model, you can put together a group of experts in their own fields. Proficient developers are creative and any creative soul requires recognition.

• Interpersonal communication is massively important for keeping remote developers integrated with your local team.
• We would definitely encourage other companies looking to hire quality engineering talent to try Turing.com.
• This is because if you can learn how to manage such employees effectively, you will obtain significant advantages, such as cost reduction and scalability.
• In ServiceNow, they’ve employed remote workers even before the pandemic, and they are used to doing the onboarding process virtually.
• A remote dedicated development team refers to a cooperation model in which a tech vendor provides a team to your company for your software product development and subsequent launch.
• This includes coverage of software management systems and project management software – all aimed at helping to shorten the software development lifecycle .
• Once you opt for remote engagement, adopt the right management skills and practices so that you can create a high-functioning, stable team.

You gain more control over the budget and the project when you hire remote dedicated software web development team in Ukraine. DashDevs offers over 150 developers and 12 years of experience in IT consulting, development, and support. Hire remote dedicated product teams, and you will access our skills and network.

The first question to ask is whether you feel the need to physically meet with your team members often, occasionally, or never. There are some employers or projects where having face-to-face meetings with team members is critical. If that’s where you find yourself, then a remote dedicated team will probably not be appropriate. Again, you don’t need to pay anything for the office rent and maintenance, equipment, and other administrative costs.

Offshore Development Center vs. In-House Team: Which one is Best for You?

That’s why gratitude and positive feedback are powerful tools to keep your remote team motivated. Use these and your developers will become more efficient and customer-oriented. If there’s no developer or team in the client’s time zone, make a shift of +/- 4 hours. Let’s say the developers are located in Krakov and Berlin, and the client works in Bucharest from nine am to six pm.

Outstaffing — when you employ separate experts you require from a contracting company and manage them yourself. The designer has the task of creating the look and feel of the application under development. Again, just like with the QA role, the number of designers on a project can grow with its scope. The product owner is responsible for conveying and maintaining the vision for the product under development to team members and communicating with all stakeholders.

This is why the hiring process is so important; you grasp the soft skills they might have. Still, when you hire the right people and have your team set up, one of the main goals is to keep improving and boosting everyone’s productivity. Team augmentation is a kind of hybrid approach, combining elements of outsourcing and in-house development. You can choose the developers who are right for your project, knowing that they will be solely dedicated to your project for as long as you need them to be. The range of available talent is even bigger with team augmentation than with traditional outsourcing. Partnering with DOIT Software, you will get top-skilled remote developers to build the desired state-of-the-art product.

Now, let’s dig deeper into the basic rules of remote software development team management. Compared to an in-house software development unit, it’s much easier to move resources around in an ODC remote center and even build a team faster. For example, at nCube we set up a typical tech team in 2-4 weeks for an offshore development center vs. in-house which takes less time than building a home-based squad.

Pros of in-house development

In its turn, GitLab discovered that approximately 82% of participants envision remote work as the future landscape of the workforce. If you want your development team to remain productive, set up a reporting mechanism so developers may provide daily/weekly updates. As motivation to keep good records, you can reward the most organized developers.

This can be done by setting up regular video or audio calls, using a project management tool like Asana or Trello , and/or sending clear and concise written updates. By collaborating with remote developers, your stages of team development explained organization will be able to foster agility and become more flexible. This is because you can more easily scale up or down your development team as needed, without the need to make long-term commitments.

Have Your Remote Team’s Time Zones in Mind

You can add all needed documentation on projects, integrate it with CMS, plugins, and stream activities like commit messages, and pull requests from Git. Spend a few minutes chatting about a work-related topic, like a news item that may be interesting to the team. Ask what they think about it, and don’t just wait for people to take the initiative to respond — call on names and be sure to listen and respond in earnest. If you’ve ever been on a Zoom call with ten people or more, you know it can be a snooze-fest. People stay quiet unless they hear their name, keep their webcams off, and are most likely just waiting for the call to end so they can go back to doing their job with no intrusions.

Uptech is top-rated app development company

Managing remote software engineering teams is a critical part of the equation for creating a positive impact in your company. The challenge with handling remote teams can be people, time, or budget constraints. Businesses and entrepreneurs from the G7 countries and other locations hire remote teams to develop their software offshore. But before you choose a development company to work with, you need to understand how to manage remote workers to make this collaboration effective and productive. We cover the top 10 best practices for managing remote employees to equip you with tools and advice for better development team management.

Dedicated Team Collaboration Tools Choice

However, the methodology is quite adequate, dividing the work into understandable segments, making all tasks visible to other team members, and helping to keep you on track. At the same time, scrum involves many team meetings so that all team members stay on the same page in the work process. Of course, this way of working has existed since the Internet was invented.

And if you ensure proper management by clearly defining roles and responsibilities, building workflows, and creating documentation, the remote team will expand your expectations. This is not surprising since, for example, Trello is one of the most straightforward project management tools for managing remote teams out there. In this programming tutorial, we will explore some of the best practices for remote software development teams so that you can stay productive no matter where you are working from. Collaborating with a remote software development team might be a bit more challenging than having an in-house team on your premises.