Expert Tips on Leading Remote Software Development Teams

Some remote software teams find it difficult to uphold agile practices and efficiently collaborate as they must juggle many tools, time zones, and backlogs of competing priorities. Lack of coordination and visibility causes software and product leaders to miss deadlines, and ultimately, delay or miss opportunities to meet customer demands. Luckily, we’ve gathered expert tips to help you quickly restructure, facilitate collaboration and ensure your organization is fully aligned and focused on the right goals. Hint: Allstacks can help! 

Before we dive in, I’ll offer some context:

If you’re not familiar with us, Allstacks is the leading predictive forecasting and risk management solution for software development. We speak to mid-size and enterprise companies daily about their challenges in delivering value to their customers through exceptional software products. These are some of their common concerns, and with remote teams, they become even more critical to address:

• What can I do to improve reporting and determine the actual state of my initiatives?
• How can I make software delivery more predictable?
• How do I align software delivery with business goals?
• How can I foster communication and collaboration among individuals and teams?
• How can I refine and scale my agile methods?
• How can I ensure my team is motivated and productive?

With good remote practices, the right processes, and reliable technology, a distributed engineering team can develop and ship high-quality products to keep company-wide objectives on track.

Jump to the different recommendations or keep on reading:

• Recommendation 1: Use better, centralized data to drive informed decisions
• Recommendation 2: Use predictive forecasting to reduce risks and achieve more predictable outcomes 
• Recommendation 3: Facilitate both autonomy and collaboration
• Recommendation 4: Use objective data to manage your team and drive continuous improvement 

Recommendation 1: Use better, centralized data to drive informed decisions

In many companies, software development efforts depend on several parallel work streams— each with different processes and milestones. Leaders need a unified way to track work in progress with varying degrees of granularity—at a high level in aggregate, all the way down to the epic or sprint.

Some organizations attempt to solve their visibility and management issues by adding project managers, creating in-house reports, or using various tools. Often, these manual processes and cumbersome reports fall short, as they still only offer a fragmented view of the entire software development and delivery lifecycle.

“Building custom reports is time-consuming and resource-intensive, so at our organization, they were only generated sporadically. The Jira configuration and standard reports around sprint progress, velocity, and burndown were too low-level,” said ndustrial.io Founder and CEO Jason Massey regarding their attempts to build an in-house solution.

You and your team need accurate, comprehensive data to make informed decisions daily, with a clear view of how well you’re tracking towards your overarching goals.

Integrations are key

Your teams already have their preferred communication channels and technology stack. The easiest path is to leverage what your team is already using to work from one source of truth and always have the most up-to-date data. Other departments, like sales, marketing, and operations, have since overcome this challenge. For instance, sales, marketing, and operations teams use Hubspot to manage their customer data, sales activities, and marketing automation; they all have access to the same information at any given time.

Allstacks make it easy for you to keep your software team in sync without changing existing workflows or tech. You simply integrate with the tools your team is already using, like Bitbucket, GitHub, and Jira, and within a few hours, Allstacks’ platform is populated with your organization’s work initiatives.

In addition to the right tools, there are a few other considerations on building a unified development culture and ensuring workstreams run smoothly. Dan Radigan of Atlassian shares his recommendations: 

• Overcommunicate decisions across all geographies
• Minimize the friction in setting up the development environment
• Clearly define the definition of done
• Create guidelines for filing effective bug reports

Recommendation 4: Use objective data to manage your team and drive continuous improvement 

We know you have a lot on your plate, from resource planning and meeting deadlines to coaching teams and reducing burnout. Allstacks data can help you, and your team develop and refine processes over time, improve capacity planning, and check individual and team impact. 

Our Individual Report provides objective insights for managers to run one-on-one and team meetings. This data-driven approach builds trust with your team and highlights any areas that need to be addressed. You can check on the impact of one contributor or an entire team for a desired amount of time. At a glance, you’ll be able to see if any new developers or remote team members are falling behind and need more training or guidance. For example, you can see how much of John Doe’s code making it into production.