During past several years, working habits and working style has been rapidly changing. And this trend will continue for sure, just visit Google trends and search for “Digital nomad” or “Remote work”. However some profession undergoes this change with a better ease than others. But it is clear that companies that understand that trend benefit from that.

Working in a different style requires a brand new set of tools and approaches which provides you similar working conditions as when people are co-located at the same office. Video conferencing and phone or skype is just the beginning and doesn’t cover all aspects.

In the following paragraphs, I am going to summarize tools I found useful while working as software developer remotely in a fully distributed team. Those tools are either free or offer some free functionality and I still consider them very useful in various situations. The spectrum of the tools starts with some project management or planning tools to communicate.

Remote Communication tools

For the communication – chat and calls Slack becomes standard tool widely adopted now. It allows you to freely organize your teams, let them create channels they need. It supports a wide range of plugins e.g. chatbots and it is well integrated with others tools. Provides application on all desktop and mobile platforms.

When solving some issue or just want to present something to the audience screen sharing becomes a very handy tool. Found Join.me pretty handy. Free plan with the limited size of the audience was just big enough. Working well on Mac OS and Windows, Linux platform I haven’t tried yet.

When it comes to the pure conferencing phone calls or chat Discord recently took my breath away by the awesome sound quality. Again it offers desktop and mobile clients. plus you can use just browser version if you do not wish to install anything on your PC.

Planning and designing tools for remote collaboration

Now I slightly move to planning and designing tools during software development process and doesn’t matter if you use Scrum or Kanban. Those have their place there.

Remote planning tools

Shared task board with post-it notes. The one I found useful and free is Scrumblr. The only disadvantage is that it is public. It allows you to design the number of sections, change the colours of the notes and add them markers etc.

When we touched an agile development methodology there is no planning and estimation without planning poker. I found useful BitPoints. Simple yet meeting all our needs and free online tool where you invite all participants to the game. It allows you to do a various setting like the type of deck etc.

Virtual Whiteboard

When designing phase reached shared online diagramming tools we found really useful is Sketchboard. It offers a wide range of diagrams types and shapes. It offers traditional UML diagrams for sure. Free versions offer few private diagrams otherwise you go public with your design. Allows comments and team discussion.

Sometimes we just missed traditional whiteboard session and just brainstorm. So a web white board tool AWW meet our needs. Simple yet powerfull.

Conclusion

This concludes the set of tools I found useful during a past year while working in a distributed team remotely. I hope that you found at least one useful or didn’t know it before. Do you have other tools you found useful or have better variants of those mentioned above? Please share it in the comment section!