Due to COVID-19, the majority of the companies have started working from home. Businesses have started going digital and for that, they are hiring remote offshore software companies. And when these experts are working from home, they would want to discuss every innovative idea they come up with and even the employer would want to keep a track of his remote works. For this, you must know the best practices for offshore software development for your business.
Though working remotely is not unusual for anyone anymore, having a perfect collaboration tool for software development is the best thing. These tools make it easy for companies to streamline team collaboration, allow them to efficiently keep track of their employee’s performance, and ensure better time management.
In this blog, we are going to talk about such tools and have a look at the top 7 tools that can be used for managing remote software developers.
Top 7 Tools for Managing Remote Software Developers
Here are some of the top tools that every offshore software development company can use to track the work of their developers and manage their tasks.
1. JIRA
JIRA is one of the most powerful team management software even after not being the only remote work managing tool in the market. Though the interface of JIRA is not as streamlined and robust as it should be, its flexibility and options for managing a team make it popular amongst software development companies.
JIRA is a tool that works perfectly fine when it is backed up with Confluence, Hipchat, Slack, and other Atlassian tools. If you use JIRA with such tools, its integration with your management workflow will become smooth.
Price of JIRA – Single user/month is $5 (with limited Free options)
2. Basecamp
Basecamp is another tool for managing remote work processes. Offshore software development services providers consider Basecamp as a perfect software project management tool that comes with everything that anyone could require to control remote software developers or a team of software experts.
Basecamp is a tool that comes with To-Do Lists. This can make your remote workers navigate through their day-to-day tasks with ease. Besides, it has Message Boards, which can be created by each team member to discuss work freely with other workers.
Basecamp, a remote software development tool, comes with features like Chat Rooms, Schedule, Check-in Questions, and Document & File Storage. All these features enable remote employees to discuss and resolve issues instantly with the manager, project lead, or other employees. They can even automate the daily stand-up meetings.
In addition to this, Basecamp also supports automated reports, kitchen sink, and notifications. And this is why it is considered one of the most powerful tools.
Price of Basecamp – Monthly charges are $99 (with limited Free options)
3. Asana
Asana is an upcoming competitor to JIRA. It is a streamlined and intuitive task manager for companies. It comes with easy-to-read and set manuals for setting the tool perfectly as per your requirements. Some of the collaboration and planning tools become exquisite and this is when Asana is considered as a life-saver tool for large projects that have complicated Epics.
Price of Asana – Monthly charges are $10-25 (with limited Free options)
4. Hubstaff Tasks
Hubstaff Tasks is one of the most Agile project management tools. It is a tool that is built to streamline collaboration in software development teams of any size. The Hubstaff Tasks tool generally uses Kanban boards to organize projects and tasks.
Hubstaff Tasks enable the software development experts to create cards for tasks and columns for different stages of their projects. This is a tool that allows you to notify your teammates about anything and everything by tagging them in comments, creating checklists, adding task labels, and progress bars.
The custom workflow feature of Hubstaff Tasks is something that enables you to automate the task assigning process. The task can be assigned to a group of developers or a specific developer working on each project stage.
Price of Hubstaff Tasks – It is a free-to-use tool for up to 10 projects. It offers 100 MB of free storage per user. The paid version of this tool includes unlimited projects and 5 GB of storage, per user. The paid version costs $4 per user per month.
5. Trello
Trello is another popular project management tool that uses the Kanban board. It is a very simple Kanban board that everyone can use to manage tasks. But one problem that users face with Trello is that it lacks any concept of Sprints. And this is why performance suffers as when one keeps over 100 cards on the same board, it stops working or works slowly.
Trello just comes with a very basic integration that combines with many collaborative tools like Atlassian platforms. But with time, it is getting upgraded and is coming with new solutions that make the system smooth for the users. For now, if you don’t have many employees on board, Trello is the best option for you.
Price of Trello – It is a Free tool.
6. Teamwork
Teamwork is yet another team management tool that is very popular amongst offshore development companies because of its usefulness. It is one of the best options for managing remote development tools.
Teamwork is a tool that comes with features like Gantt charts and Kanban boards which makes the software development process very easy. Besides, it comes with a live chat feature that enables the team members to easily connect with each other in real-time. It is a tool that has a whole host of ready-made templates. These templates can help the users to set up projects with ease and also get access to features like a project tracker.
In addition to this, Teamwork is a remote development tool that becomes a single source of truth for your team. When all the team members are assigned tasks using this tool, everyone who is included in that particular task knows who is responsible to complete this task and when. This makes every process transparent.
Teamwork comes with an easy-to-use interface and not much training is required to start working with this tool.
Price of Teamwork – $10 Single user/month (limited free options)
7. Connecteam
Last in this list of top remote work managing tools for developers is Connecteam. It is an all-in-one employee management tool. Connecteam is a tool that is designed for remote teams. But also enables companies to manage both remote and in-house teams of software development experts.
With Connecteam, one can easily engage remote teams like never before. This can help in reflecting the company’s culture and also helps in creating a strong bond between the employees and employer.
The project manager or team lead can easily track the time of his team members with ease. It comes with a clock in and out feature which helps in tracking down employees’ details, enhance timesheets, improve payroll, and collaborate with remote teams.
In addition to this, Connecteam helps in simplifying the schedule of the employees with the help of features like templates, status updates, in-shift tasks, and messaging boards. Companies can also create mobile task management systems from the ground for their employees. Or can also create digital forms, checklists, and reports for the remote teams.
Price of Connecteam – The premium version starts from $29/month for up to 200 users.
To start understanding the tool, go with the free life plan.
Conclusion
Managing remote teams can be challenging but with the use of the right tool, remote collaboration can become a very easy and effective task. There are multiple remote team management tools available in the market, some of which are free and some are paid. In this blog, we went through the top 7 remote developer management tools that can help every offshore software development company to track remote workers with ease. You can go with any of these tools as per your requirement.
Admin
Marshal Hubs
Priyanka Srivastava
John Stephen
Nathan Smith