Even if you have great people on your software project things could go easily wrong. It’s a huge challenge to figure out what’s the right thing to do and make the decision on task prioritization and keep the team focused. Moreover, a mutual and cordial relation is required to be built when you are going for Offshore Software Development.

A continuous communication, transparency and skilled labor are the basic ingredients to make offshore Software Development work for your organization. These determine the quality of the work and make sure that the product will be delivered according to the expectations.

Matrix Marketers is an offshore software development company who has successfully completed various IT projects developed from outside. Since we are dealing in IT products. To automate offshore software development, certain tools are used.

In this post, we are mentioning few tools which might help your company for offshore software development and will make the difference in product development.

At Matrix Marketers, we use them to manage every aspect of software development and keep our clients informed about our work. The combination of these tools and management methods collaborate together to bring productive results.

SLACK

Slack is a messaging app for team members to establish a communication link. It allows organizing team communication into channels according to topics, projects or teams. Slack can be a perfect tool while working as an offshore development team to communicate and work together as a single team. It makes communication transparent and everyone involved in the project gets a picture of the current state of the project.

For Matrix Marketers, Slack serves as the backbone of our team and project communication. It’s our virtual office where every people involved in the project from our client and from our side joins.

The main features include:

• Organize your team conversations in open and private channels
• Drag and drop file sharing
• Google Drive, GitHub connectivity
• Video conferencing

GOOGLE HANGOUTS

Google Hangouts is a free solution for screen sharing and video conferencing. Apart from using chat platform, there needs to be a way that provides face-to-face communication between you and your offshore software developer team.

At Matrix Marketers, we use Google Hangouts to hold daily, 10-minute stand-up meetings where every team member provides information about their progress, daily goals and potential obstacles that could prevent them completing their daily tasks.

It’s also recommended to hold weekly/monthly reviews where the whole project team takes a real view on the project.

Main features:

• Video calls
• Phone calls
• Screen sharing

GITHUB

At Matrix Marketers, GitHub is our prime tool. It’s a code sharing and publishing service for every person involved in the project, making it easier to track the developers on the tasks they are performing in the project. It is optional to give access to your client fully or partially on GitHub. This is the most crucial part of our transparency manifesto.

When working with a software development team outside from your company, we ensure that our business partners join the project on GitHub to share a better understanding on the project’s progress.

Main features:

• Trendy UX and Version control
• Integration with other tools

TRELLO

It’s really simple board-based task management tool. During a software project, there are many tasks that need to be performed and these are shared among team members.

Trello provides an easy to use interface to add and assign tasks, track progress and plan sprints. You can see how the tasks are completed and what needed to be completed.

We recommend to create a board for your project and share it with every project member.

Main features:

• Organizing tasks into lists and boards
• Attaching files and setting deadlines
• Sharing and co-editing boards

GOOGLE DRIVE

This is the simplest and best tool to co – edit a document online and it is a free tool. It also can be integrated with Slack, making it possible to share every document with both the teams.

Main features:

• Sharing word documents, spreadsheets, presentations
• Free storage
• Co-editing documents and tracking changes

DOCUSIGN

Printing documents, signing documents and finding a working scanner to scan it and send it back. Usually, this is the process of signing documents when parties aren’t in the same location. In this case, DocuSign will work as an essential tool for your offshore process.

It allows to electronically sign documents without printing them. You can simply embed electronic signing into your existing documents. Collecting signatures can be managed within minutes. DocuSign has a multiple level authentication processes to identify signers before given any access to the documents.

Main features:

• Wide accessibility with devices
• Strong security
• Flexibility in use (API integrations)

SHIPPABLE

This platform integrates teams and processes to streamline shipping of software. An automatic software delivery from source control to production, without needing to write complex, imperative code can be done with Shippable. It’s a great tool to speed up software shipping and also an alternative tool.

Main features:

• Test Automation and Continuous Deployment.
• Integrations with tool like Slack, GitHub, Docker
• Technology independent

CONCLUSION

Despite of all these and many other powered tools, offshore software development has its own risk and challenges. Still the maximum time, offshoring team has its own set of complaints and vice versa. The above-mentioned tools are effective and we have found better connectivity with our business partners with better understanding. The communication gap is filled with the use of these tools and now at Matrix Marketers, we are so familiar with the developing team that it seems, they are sitting next to us. We and our developing partners are delivering quality software products with ease. If your company is thinking about building an offshore development model or you are already a part of this, we strongly suggest the use of these tools.