5 best practices for remote development teams

Currently, one of the biggest challenges for remote developers is a possible drop in internet connection quality once they move from the office to their home setup. In addition, ISPs face extreme loads on their shared networks because of the surge of people now working from home. This has become a perfect storm of problems for organizations of any size tasked with supporting isolated team members.

Development team work typically involves data-intensive tasks, such as connecting to VMs and pulling large blocks of code from centralized repositories. All of these tasks take more time now, thanks to the limitations of VPNs required to ensure a secure connection to a corporate network.

To counter bandwidth clogging, remote development teams would be well served to upgrade their home internet. But instead of forcing workers to do this on their own dime, organizations should budget money to provide updates and treat it as a company expense. It realistically should be part of their IT budget, especially as organizations divert funds from typical office maintenance and use them to support remote workers at scale.

Additionally, development teams need to assess their tooling and look at options that focus on data awareness. This includes tools that support phased transfers of large data and can seamlessly resume transactions stalled by bandwidth issues. And rather than pulling an entire repository every few hours, it would also be prudent to maintain local copies of the main code to work against.

Despite the odds, software delivery practices need to remain the same. But I think applying these tactics can help development teams to overcome the obstacles and operate at peak levels.

Twain Taylor is a freelance contributor for TechTarget.