Remote Software Development. How To Make It Work For You

The remote development process is different from the conventional office cooperation, and the most significant difference is communication. While the majority of development teams have zero challenges in communicating face-to-face, remote cooperation tends to disrupt the established processes.

Here at TekkSoft, we've conducted research on the remote cooperation effectiveness and are excited to share the results with you. With that said, let's discover the core components of cooperation effectiveness. We'll also cover the most favorable team setups for efficient remote development processes.

Remote Cooperation: Why It Is Different

We are used to expressing our attitude, putting on accents, and establishing contact via gestures in our face-to-face communication. There is more to it: we are quite used to reading people's reactions by their facial expressions and gestures as well. This is called a comprehensive communication. Remote development rarely provides that.

Here are the primary reasons why remote format handicaps the cooperation:

• Lack of control. It is significantly harder to organize a team meeting. Even if you have extremely responsible employees, some external factors like poor Internet connection or electricity shutdown may ruin it for you;
• Insufficient engagement. If we consider a full-team meeting, there are few opportunities for a video call with 10+ people at once. Otherwise, it's more of a team lead speech broadcasting, than an actual meeting;
• Overcomplicated discussion. You can see that a person has something to say in a real-life meeting, so you can give him or her a word. Imagine yourself trying to introduce a crucial point to 15 people on a single call trying to say something at the same time.

On the whole, remote cooperation reduces your communication effectiveness, one way or another. It is up to you to build the plainest processes to make your remote communication more transparent. With that said, let's figure out the best communication channels for your remote work management and find out what are the optimal project requirements for remote development.

Communication Channels: What Are Your Options

First things first, let's have a look at the following chart:

 This data represents the communication effectiveness by channels. Here's what it means for you:

• Working only with documentation is considered the least performant approach. Having no one to assist you except the written document most often leads to ultimate confusion and disarray in your process;
• Email is a more efficient communication channel than just project documentation. However, it still lacks the communication speed that you can achieve by speech instead of text messages;
• Phone calls introduce the speech into your remote communication, and this is what makes it significantly better than the previous two. It saves time for developers and allows them to focus on what matters;
• Video calls bring additional engagement to your communication, as people can see each other and express their thoughts not only by voice but also by gestures and facial expressions.

These are the ones you can use in your remote cooperation. Compare those to the Face-to-Face and F2F Whiteboard meeting performance, and you'll have a grasp of how drastically the communication may suffer from the remote format, depending on the selected approach.

Development Team Setup: Which Team Setups Perform Better

As for team efficiency, some developer groups may show excellent or poor performance regardless of communication channels. Let's have a look at the following table for better understanding:

As you can see, 2 parameters impact team communication, namely:

• Team size. The larger the team, the more it's difficult to set up efficient communication processes. 2 - 4 developers tend to find common ground far easier than enormous teams or sets of teams;
• Team member seniority. We mean the time developers worked in this specific team. People establish effective communication over time, and the newcomers aren't always easy to integrate into the formed team.

On balance, small teams with established team members will perform the best in the remote development format, while large teams with newcomers(less than 6-month experience in the current team) will feel the real struggle in finding common ground.

Remote Projects: Best Project Types For Remote

There are several project aspects you should consider when deciding on remote cooperation. These include but are not limited to the following:

• Project size. Whether it's a fresh startup, SME, large enterprise, or legacy project;
• Work type. There is a substantial difference between fixing UI bugs and implementing new core functionality, as these consume nearly incomparable amounts of resources.

Let's consider both of them in detail.

Project Size

This aspect doesn’t have a linear dependency that you may have noticed in the previous ones. Have a look:

As you can see, small and medium enterprises tend to require the least communication that exceeds 5-minute calls. The reason why new businesses and startups are not the best options for remote is that early development stages require a lot of decision-making. This creates risks for making a mistake, which will become harder and harder to fix with every next iteration.

As for large enterprises and legacy projects, those often have an enormous codebase and a lot of dependencies. This makes large products somewhat incompatible with remote cooperation, because it may take a considerable time to come up with a solution, even for a small change.

Type Of Work

This table also displays the dependency of cooperation intensity from the type of works needed on a project, namely:

• Bug fixes and UI changes. These activities rarely require comprehensive preparation and - therefore - are safe for remote cooperation;
• Business logic changes. Business logic is more error-prone than bug fixes but you can still successfully perform these changes on the remote;
• Core functionality development. This is where it gets questionable. You see, changing the solution scaffold is one of the most challenging tasks. One mistake, and the whole software product may become a mess in a blink of an eye. Our TekkSoft experts recommend reducing core development to a minimum when working remotely.

To sum up, remote cooperation is not suitable for complex tasks. The less business logic and solution core activities you transfer to the remote format, the better.

The Bottom Line

Remote cooperation is not an equal alternative to conventional office cooperation. As you can see, there are some lossless combinations of team setups and project types. These may work almost as effectively as the traditional development processes. Nevertheless, remote cooperation negatively affects the better part of the development activities.

Selecting the most suitable communication channels for your teams and splitting development departments into functional groups can level the limiting effect of remote cooperation. 

Concentrate on a bigger picture of your internal cooperation and don't skimp on efficient cooperation approaches, even if those are resource-consuming. It always pays off, especially on the remote.