Greater efficiency yields optimum productivity. You need the best productivity tools for developers to do things quickly and strategically. Learn more about these productivity tools in this article.

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the way the world works today. Livelihoods and industries saw a major shift in daily workflows when the pandemic hit multiple aspects of human life. Evidently, business operations did not escape this. Since operations depend on the workforce, businesses are faced with challenges in productivity where their survival lies. With the advent of new public health protocols, businesses are slowly transitioning back to on-site work. However, there are still challenges that businesses need to address to continue operating seamlessly. These challenges will include:

• work from home arrangements
• hybrid work arrangements
• communication
• maintaining productivity, and
• team management

Thankfully, technology exists. As we know, a great product should always solve a problem. And with problems this big, generally affecting the economy, tech solutions should come in handy and be accessible. Enter productivity tools for businesses.

Productivity Tools for Developers and Software Teams

Productivity tools for different types of business activities have always been there. Do you want to leave some information to your team before taking a vacation? Write an email. Having trouble tracing issues within your code? Use a debugger. Most of these tools are already available in the market. You don’t even have to spend much because the most popular ones come in either free or freemium.

Now, the only challenge you have left is choosing which one to use. It’s important to know that there’s no single tool that fits all business types or activities. Therefore, tools are only useful when they provide value for greater efficiency and productivity. So, software teams and developers need only the best tools to deliver quality products.

In this article, we’ll give popular productivity tools recommended for every developer and software team activity.

Productivity tools for developers

There are tons of productivity tools for developers who are working on different projects. These tools include debuggers, IDEs, libraries, etc. Now, we’ll introduce the most popular productivity tools recommended in every developer’s arsenal.

Peer Review: Collaborator

This is especially useful for developers working in teams. Collaborator is a peer document and code review software tool for developers working together and apart. According to the company, this tool is “for development teams who take quality seriously”.

Collaborator provides comprehensive functionalities allowing developers to review source codes, documents, slides, PDFs, Visio Diagrams, and images in one tool. It also has integrations for GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Jira, Visual Studio, and more. Additionally, Collaborator provides real-time updates for review tracking, threaded chats, and proof of review for team visibility.

IDE: RAD Studio

RAD Studio is one of the top tools used by developers today. This is an integrated development environment (IDE) powerful enough to build native apps for desktop and mobile platforms.

Features include a single code base usable for the platforms mentioned above. Additionally, HTTP and REST libraries are available in the IDE. These are useful for applications using REST architecture or AWS and Azure components.

Code Testing: Embold

Tracing code issues and bugs is part of efficient software development. This next development tool makes sure that’s the case.

Embold is a software analytics tool that analyzes source codes, traces code issues, and identifies errors. Through this, developers can build applications that are robust, secure, stable, and scalable. Moreover, Embold has plugins that help identify vulnerabilities as you code. This tool promises fast code checking in over ten different programming languages. As a plus, you can also integrate Embold with Bitbucket, Azure, GitHub, and more.

Version Control: Bitbucket

We’ve mentioned this as an integration of the preceding productivity tools, so it rightfully deserves a spot on this list.

Bitbucket is a web-based version control application used by developers as a software repository. With this in mind, this includes collaborative features allowing developers to write and review codes. Additionally, Bitbucket offers services for issue tracking, unlimited private repositories, issue tracking, and smart mirroring among others. This tool is free for five users but offers premiums for growing development teams.

Application Design: Bootstrap

Bootstrap is an open-source framework used for developing responsive web and mobile projects using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This allows web developers to build and design fast and simple applications.

Since this toolkit is open-source, Bootstrap is easily customizable based on your application’s requirements. This is also made more efficient due to its drag and drop functionality. Its built-in components are powerful enough to let you build responsive software projects.

Cloud Service: Microsoft Azure

One of the most popular services in the software industry today is Microsoft Azure. Backed by tech giant Microsoft, Azure lives up to its mother company’s reputation for providing quality services.

Azure is a cloud-based service used for designing, deploying, managing, and testing web and cloud applications or services. Making up the list of its array of services are messaging, storage, business analytics, caching, media services, and software infrastructure. It supports multiple programming languages and a wide range of operating systems, frameworks, and devices.

These are just a few of the productivity tools for developers. You can browse for more tools that fit your business needs based on the categories above. Whether it’s a tool for code analysis or version control, you should properly select based on the project requirements. As mentioned, there’s no one tool that fits all so choose carefully.

Productivity Tools for Software Teams

Now that we’re acquainted with tools for important development areas, let’s look at productivity tools for software teams. Take note that the individual developer tools above only work when they fuse seamlessly with the team’s dynamics. That said, teamwork always involves collaboration, communication, and management.

Video Conferencing: Zoom

Probably one of the most downloaded apps since the pandemic started is Zoom. Although businesses have been using this before, it saw a dramatic peak in search rates in March 2020. Zoom is relatively popular due to its lightweight and optimized conference calls. This feature makes it perfect for software teams especially those whose members are working remotely.

With Zoom, you can host end-to-end calls, team meetings, and even seminars with a large group of people. The app is free but you can upgrade your access to maximize app functions like unlimited duration and bigger capacity.

Team Communication and Messaging: Slack

Do you ever need to inform a workmate with a message that’s too short to email? You definitely need a messaging app for your team.

Slack is a business communication platform fit for small to large-sized organizations. Within Slack, you can create chat groups (referred to as channels) for different purposes. It could be for pull requests, review requests, resource requests, and even simply just for group messaging. One of Slack’s best features is its compatibility with more than 4000 apps and tools. These include Bitbucket, Jira, Confluence, Zoom, Google Calendar, Giphy, and more. It has a free version but purchasing its premium access allows for more users and storage space.

Slack is available for desktop and mobile devices.

Project Documentation: Confluence

Confluence is a web-based collaboration tool for project knowledge repository and documentation. This tool contains pages for different document types and spaces for team collaboration. Additionally, they equipped their platform with common templates for software product requirements. Since this tool is developed by Atlassian, it’s easily integrated with Bitbucket and Jira.

Issue Management: Jira

Jira is a highly effective web-based tool to plan, monitor, and deploy quality software products. Its main features are the Scrum and Kanban boards where you can choose your workflow or build your own. With Jira, you can create user stories of the anticipated tasks in the backlogs. Once done, you can plan your future sprints based on priority and task dependencies.

Additionally, Jira provides real-time Agile reports for issue statuses to give insights on how the team is doing. Save time from using multiple apps with Jira’s integrations and drag-and-drop features.

Invest in Productivity Tools for Developers and Teams

Just like every superhero has a sidekick, every development team should also have its toolboxes. The great thing about using tech tools in business and development activities is that it makes the team more flexible.

Seeing the way the world works today, many businesses have employed remote and hybrid work setups. This is possible because of tech advancements that allow people to still be efficient and productive regardless of work arrangements.

One thing that also makes productivity tools useful is business outsourcing or offshoring. Businesses that have software development partners have been using many of these tools.

Full Scale offers remote software development and marketing teams for businesses looking to scale up. We recruit the best software developers, testers, managers, and technical writers who excel in what they do. We also make sure our talents employ productivity tools in their work to provide quality outputs for our customers.

Looking for a productive software development team? You’ve come to the right place. Reach out to us today and let’s start scaling up your business!