Best Collaboration Tools for Distributed Teams

Upstack
5 min readDec 10, 2020

Atlassian is providing Bitbucket Cloud, its cloud-based version of the popular open-source project management platform, to help employees work remotely with organizations to help fight the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic. Bitbucket Cloud is part of Atlassian’s suite of tools, which includes the company’s open-source business development, product management, and business intelligence tools.

For distributed teams, excellence in communication follows the same principles as good office-based communication should. As a remote team manager, you need to shorten the gap by cultivating a feeling your team members are doing something wonderful together.

Here are the tools you can use, based on psychology and our very own practical experience, to improve communication in remote teams.

Jira

Jira is a tool that helps executives and team leaders to easily plan, track, and adjust work schedules. Even if the agile methodology is mainly related to the IT sector, it is present in other sectors-and even in our daily lives. You can set up sprints with Jira, create and assign tasks, build a hierarchy of the things to be done within the scope of the project, track the completion of the task. Jira has a user-friendly time-logging function where members of the team can estimate the time needed to complete a task and then record the hours actually spent.

Jira is a project management tool by Atlassian, used by many companies.

It strengthens team coordination by adding continuity and order to the monitoring of progress. With Jira, a project can be divided into epics or tales, each of which can include tasks, issues, or bugs. A single owner is assigned to each item generated on Jira, which drives transparency. Jira is also perfect for joining a project team of new members, where they can start smaller, well-scoped tasks.

GitHub

GitHub is a hosting service for the Git repository, it incorporates many of its own functions. Git is a command-line tool, and GitHub is a Web-based graphical interface. It also provides access control and other interactive features for each project, such as a wiki and simple task management tools.

GitHub offers three things: hosting, pull-requests, and added functionality for Git Repos. When it comes to remote work, each one is a bulls-eye, as you can handle problems in the same place where you handle your code.

For your tech squad, GitHub is the focal point. This is where the code is, where the versions of Git are handled, etc. As such, it’s where numerous developers run together.

Slack

Slack is a networking tool for the workplace, “a centralized location for messaging, resources and files.” Slack is an instant messaging device with plenty of other workplace tool add-ins. To use Slack, however, the add-ins are not required since the key feature is all about talking to other people. In Slack, two chat methods exist channels (group chat) and direct messages (person-to-person chat).

Visibility is a crucial feature of distributed teams that Slack can provide. With channels grouped by subject and programs, a well-organized, open Slack team makes it easier to see the performance of all, including those far from headquarters. If remote employees post as much as their on-site colleagues to Slack, chances are they are just as efficient.

Jambird

Jambird is a collaborative tool that boosts productivity in distributed teams. Jambird is a free Slack integration built by , which lets the team communicate in real-time what they are working on. It is a pleasant way to get a feel for your company’s pulse and what your team is actually working on. To share your work status, it focuses on increasing teamwork using a simple ‘/jam’ command. The ‘bird’ registers your jam, attaches a gif to it, and adds it to your jam list. It’s that simple.

Upstack core members have been working with Jambird. The thread-based system helps Upstackers to interact easier during the day, keeping each other in touch on a variety of operations, and at the end of the day, everyone gets a cool roundup. It promotes transparency, provides real-time updates, and is the right tool for avoiding micromanagement. Make it fun to keep everyone up to date!

Upstack built Jambird to maximize collaboration for remote teams. It is a core tool at Upstack, one that we are using daily & giving it to the community is a statement that we are constantly working on improving remote work.⠀

Another handy feature is the app integration, which keeps Jira and GitHub up to date with notifications. There are a number of third-party APIs that you can integrate with, such as Slack, Slack Connect, and the third-party API for Slack.

To integrate Git into your DevOps workflow, you also need to host a repository where your team members can get things done. You can optimize your git workflow by connecting to the GitKraken Git GUI, a powerful tool for continuous integration and deployment of Git projects.

To help the team function as well as possible Invision has a range of integrations, including Jira, Slack, and Basecamp. Adding new members to the project team, where they can take on tiny, well-covered projects, is also fantastic.

Jira can help teams organize and manage a variety of projects, processes, and tasks. With Jiras and Agile Boards and Reports, you can now plan, track, and track all your agile and project management tasks with one tool.

In the end…

GitHub is the backbone of any remote development team and is basically a repository of source code hosting tools for open source projects. It is also one of the highest-rated platforms for developer institutions to host projects, and it is ideal for working with remote teams because it is easy to host and review code, manage projects and develop software. GitHub is a free and open-source hosting tool that also allows code review, collaboration, bug tracking, etc.

It is excellent to encourage your engineers to communicate with each other, but it is important to make sure that you and your team-mates keep everyone informed of their work. This can be done through Slack, GitLab, GitHub, Bitbucket, and other open-source tools.

Hire the top 1% tech freelance talent through Upstack!

Originally published at https://blog.upstack.co on December 10, 2020.

--

--

Upstack
Upstack

Written by Upstack

The World's Best Developers on Demand

No responses yet