The AROBS’ software developer toolbox – part 1

We asked our colleagues around and we collected here the must-have toolbox for remote work from home in the Coronavirus era.

Our software developers use them daily, and they swear by these tools they chose.

These keep their productivity up, their team cohesion strong and their communication impeccable.

Many teams working on our projects for Healthcare Software Development, IoT, Enterprise Solutions, Automotive or Travel Software business lines answered happily to our questions. They sent their preferences for #WFH tools from their own #MyAROBSHomeOffice (take a look at the AROBS people home-offices, with cats, books, coffee – the full package).

We gathered a lot of information and we will publish on our blog two episodes. The first will be about the communication tools used by software developer on a daily basis, and the second will be about the project management and Integrated development environment software.

We stay safe and we stay tuned in the remote and work from home era

Our colleagues, despite the urban mythology about the not-very-sociable software developers, are very talkative people. So, they use a plethora of communication and conferencing tools, listed here below.

Microsoft Teams is one of the most used communication and collaboration tool by a software developer, that solves our necessities regarding workplace chat, video meetings, file storage, and application integration. The service integrates with the Office 365 suite and it offers the possibility to also be integrated with non-Microsoft products. As restrictions related to Coronavirus pandemic started to expand in Europe a couple of days ago, the popular software had a difficult day; to quote a very interesting title, “as the world and its cats start working from home” (FYI, Sophie is the name of the model in the picture above). But it recovered fast and it announces new interesting messaging features for April 2020.

Zoom Video Communications is another well-known remote conferencing service that offers video conferencing, online meetings, chat, and mobile collaboration our software developers love to use. Since the pandemic started, the company has offered the opportunity to hold meetings with up to 1000 video participants for business account holders.

Skype for Business is the enterprise version of the instant messaging software we all know since… forever. It is designed for use with the on-premises Skype for Business Server software, and software as a service version offered as part of Office 365. However, it seems that, very soon, Skype will be replaced by Microsoft Teams.

Slack offers many IRC-style features, like chat rooms (channels) organized by topic, private groups, and direct messaging. It is a freemium product; whose main paid features are the ability to search more than 10,000 archived messages and add unlimited apps and integrations.

Cisco Webex is famous in the business of conferencing and videoconferencing applications. Its most renowned products are Webex Meetings, Webex Teams, Training Center, Event Center, Support Center, Sales Center, MeetMeNow, PCNow, Webex AIM Pro Business Edition, Webex WebOffice, and WebEx Connect. All of them are part of the Cisco Systems collaboration tools portfolio.

Since the outbreak of the Coronavirus crisis, they launched extensive guides to help our teams of software developers communicate and collaborate better under these circumstances.