The severity of the outbreak this year seems to be beyond the scope of all expected, as the national legal holiday is coming to an end, everyone returned to work there is still a risk, even if has returned to work, now all the people returned to the company work is not a wise choice, through remote office productivity loss to reduce companies appear to be necessary, What are the possible costs and ways to mitigate telecommuting? Today we are going to talk about a few questions about telecommuting for software development teams.

Goal-driven vs. time-driven

When it comes to telecommuting, the first thing that probably comes to mind is that the working hours are out of control and the team members’ output is out of control.

Goal traction, for the brain workers in the software industry, there is no way to know what the employee is doing even in the company, especially in the case of telecommuting, we can solve this problem by more specific and fine-grained goal traction. Goals are recommended to be broken down to a daily level with clarity on whether or not they are being met, and to facilitate daily commitments through transparency of progress, as discussed in the section on Goal Unraveling and transparency of progress.

Target traction is not completely don’t emphasize the work time, communication has become increasingly important in software development, in order to ensure the efficiency of communication, team members still need to have a clear work time, usually can refer to company normal work time, can work and staff time to online, ensure that other members need to communicate can at any time.

Code cloud hosting VS code Intranet cannot be accessed

Another issue developers need to address when telecommuting is the environment. If your company has to develop in an Intranet environment and does not provide remote or VPN capabilities, telecommuting is almost impossible. However, as long as the developers of most companies have a computer, they can basically develop the work, so the problem that remains to be solved may be how to do the code on the Intranet server?

Cloud hosting code, now provide code managed cloud services have more and more, the service has been more and more mature, code security can also with the full protection, you can choose to code the server migration to the cloud from the company’s hosting service, team members can code library collaboration based on the cloud.

Remote code writing, code quality should not be relaxed, and more attention should be paid to quality assurance measures, most of the code hosting platform to provide code scanning, code review, continuous integration and other capabilities, can better ensure the quality of remote development.

There are many code cloud hosting services to choose from. Taking the enterprise code hosting service provided by Code cloud Gitee, an early player in this business in China, as an example, it can fully meet the requirements of remote code collaboration:

Gitee Enterprise edition also provides services such as code scanning and review based on submission:

Requirements disassembly VS unclear and untraceable

Software development revolves around requirements, and when requirements are unclear in a centralized office, it’s easy to get up and talk to the product manager in person, but telecommuting may not be as convenient, so requirements documentation and requirements breakdown are important.

Requirements must be documented. With the rise of Agile software development in recent years, one of the biggest misconceptions about Agile is that “Agile doesn’t need documentation”. A document that clearly defines requirements scenarios and boundaries is the foundation of team collaboration, although the form of the document can be agreed upon by the team itself.

Requirements are broken down, and tasks are broken down to day size. Agile emphasizes rapid delivery and iteration, often breaking requirements down into smaller granularity for rapid development, testing, and live validation. Requirements are usually divided into Feature and Story levels for management (Feature is used to manage a complete solution to a user’s problem, Story is used to manage the management that can quickly flow within the team and deliver user value points, Story usually has a workload scale of 1 ~ 3 days, If you are interested in requirement splitting and management, please refer to the introduction in User Story Map). For remote development, it is recommended to manage it at the next level, namely, feature-story-task. Developers need to split stories into day-level tasks and clearly define the output of each Task. Output should be acceptable, not a Story completion percentage split.

Requirements should have tools to manage tracking. Some teams may use simple tools such as Excel to manage requirements items on a daily basis, but it is recommended to use some online management tools, which are more convenient for remote real-time coordination and viewing, and can make your management efficiency higher

Code cloud hosting service platforms basically provide demand management capabilities. Take the enterprise version of Code Cloud Gitee as an example to see several key points of tool support:

Requirements need to support hierarchy: Gitee Enterprise edition supports user-defined “task” types and sub-tasks for “tasks”, which can support the hierarchical management of the requirements mentioned above

Provides kanban for quick progress tracking and management: Gitee Enterprise edition supports kanban viewing by status, responsibility, type, and so on

State the kanban

Members of the board

In addition to individual requirements, you need to have some statistics for the entire team project to look at the overall picture, such as requirements completion rate, team burn out chart, etc


Daily “meetings” VS unclear planning and progress

Since telecommuting prevents teams from meeting, a daily “regular meeting” with a sense of ritual is necessary. “Regular meetings” can not only enhance team closeness, but also be used to clarify the daily mission objectives of team members, and solve the obstacles encountered by team members, etc

“Regular meetings” can take the agile approach of standing meetings and focus on each team member’s three questions:

What did I accomplish yesterday?

What do I plan to do today?

What obstacles have I encountered?

“Regular meetings” can be held using video conference system, skype, Zoom, Huawei Welink (free during the epidemic) are good choices. The videoconferencing system allows team members to see each other and share computer screens against our requirements management tool platform. In the meeting, in addition to information synchronization, the person in charge of all tasks and completion time should be made clear (the whole team’s stage plan can be discussed in another meeting).

In addition, the items to be followed up determined in the “regular meeting” can be followed up by a special “type” on the management tool platform to ensure that they are not lost.

Instant communication VS uncontrollable risk and low efficiency

The effective implementation of telecommuting depends on the trust of the team members, and trust is also based on the team having a basic covenant. At the beginning of telecommuting, the team needs to agree on the basic covenant, including at least:

1) Comply with the basic working hours, at least to ensure smooth contact during working hours

2) With Owner consciousness, the promised target should be achieved with guaranteed quality and quantity

3) Goal-driven, timely communication and feedback should be provided when problems occur, not limited to email, IM and phone

I can’t emphasize enough with my team that timely, proactive communication is Paramount in remote Settings.

In the face of a major epidemic, everyone’s life and health comes first. The best thing for us to do is to protect ourselves when we are unable to participate in the front line, and at the same time, to do our jobs by telecommuting to ensure the survival and sustainable development of our companies.

Wish the epidemic an early end.