Creating great software depends on seamless and easy collaboration between software developers. Principles, such as Agile and its associated frameworks, are testaments to this idea. But more and more, creating great software that leads to great digital products also depends on collaboration across the entire team.
In this guide, we’ll explore five great collaborations and what they can do to spark creativity and communication for your teams. Along the way, we’ll see how staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud can bring all these tools together to create a collaborative suite that’s much more than a project management tool. But first, let’s find out why great collaboration tools are so valuable.
Why do software dev teams need collaboration tools?
Collaboration fosters creative thinking and builds on alternative perspectives to improve productivity across the entire team, ultimately leading to better outcomes.
To understand why this is, putting some principles of collaboration under the microscope helps bring things into focus:
- Open communication: When team members and stakeholders communicate openly, barriers between departments break down and information silos open up between developers and other key teams.
- Rapid feedback and improvement: A strong culture of collaboration creates strong project ownership, leading to feedback loops that encourage team members to work together and improve individually to impact projects as a whole.
- Use the right tools: The right tools foster innovation and communication between teams and enable those teams to focus on doing great work, rather than working on tools.
Of course, collaboration tools immensely benefit remote teams who otherwise have few opportunities to interact organically. But as we’ll see in the following examples, in-house devs can benefit just the same.
5 indispensable collaboration tools for software development
Whether your devs are distributed across the globe or working in an office, sitting a few feet apart, these five tools will help them do better work with each other and other project teams.
GitHub
GitHub is the premier software development collaboration platform. Powered by git, an open-source versioning system, GitHub enables developers to store, share, and track source code. Millions of devs rely on GitHub in their daily workflows — so much so that it’s nearly ubiquitous in the software world.
In simple terms, GitHub stores the entire history of a project’s codebase, which every dev can access and contribute to. This does wonders for software development in that devs can contribute their work incrementally while project owners can conduct code reviews and ensure that every addition, down to a single line of code, is of the highest quality.
Slack
Collaboration is all about sharing and communication, and Slack makes doing this digitally simple and easy. At its core, Slack is a chat and file-sharing platform for communicating via text in real-time. While its focus is on text communication, it also features great voice and video conferencing capabilities.
In Slack, communication streams are organized into channels, representing teams, topics, or departments. Team members can join multiple channels and communicate across the organization, commenting on threads, sharing files, and solving problems asynchronously.
Google Drive and Google Docs
When it comes to online collaboration tools, Google is much more than a search giant. Its suite of tools features a variety of web-based business tools for document, spreadsheet, and presentation creation. Each tool provides powerful collaboration features that let team members work on documents simultaneously while following each other’s work in real-time.
In addition to its fully-featured office tools, Google also provides cloud storage via Google Drive, which makes sharing documents simple. The best part about it is that those team members who prefer using Word and Excel can store their files on Google Drive, and Google Docs users can still access the same files via the web.
Jira
Another popular tool among software developers is Jira. Jira is a bug tracking and project management tool designed specifically for software development. It’s also designed around Agile principles and the Scrum framework, meaning it lends itself to incremental software development that favors collaboration and continuous integration.
staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud
When it comes to modern product development, strong cross-functional teams have a 76% success rate. This means a highly effective team consisting of devs, designers, marketers, operations, and other key departments work closely, sharing knowledge and feedback while raising the bar across the board. As such, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention our own collaboration powerhouse, staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud.
With staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud’s powerful collaboration features, an entire product or project team can put all their work under one digital roof. This means better communication, fewer information silos, and more innovation. And since flexibility is built into staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud’s core, every team member and every department maintains the workflows that work for them.
Let’s take a closer look at how staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud improves the experience for developers and the project as a whole.
staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud helps software dev teams communicate and accomplish more
staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud is built with collaboration at its core. We know that every team and department has their own way of working, so we’ve made staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud with simplicity in mind. With a few clicks, every team can create custom workflows that match their way of working. But it doesn’t stop there.
staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud provides cross-functional product teams with powerful integrations that span Google Docs, Slack, Jira, and GitHub — just to name a few.In other words, staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud provides an inclusive platform that supports every department and creates an environment of collaboration that puts everything the entire team needs on a single platform. In short, there’s less time spent tooling and more time spent creating.
If you want to see staging-mondaycomblog.kinsta.cloud in action, we have some templates to get you going.
Related templates
Ready to dive in? Check out one of these pre-made templates and get a jump-start on dev collaboration with just a few clicks.
Kanban software development template
Kanban is an immensely popular task management approach for software devs. It enables teams to visualize tasks and track project progress in real-time, all without a lot of interactive overhead. With this Kanban Software Development Template, Kanban gets an upgrade. The same clarity and intuitiveness of Kanban in a fully customizable task board helps you manage your tasks and find the workflow that fits your development style.
Full product development template
For larger projects, this full Product Development Template will take you from project manager to project visionary. Easily manage development with an intuitive roadmap that comes with every stage needed to deliver top-tier products. Made for Agile dev teams, this template makes managing every level of a sprint simple, from planning to retrospective and everything in between.
If you’re looking for more collaboration ideas, take a look at the answers to these common questions people ask.
FAQs
What are project collaboration tools?
Project collaboration tools describe software used to facilitate open collaboration and communication for project team members and other stakeholders. They enable teams to openly approach development collaboration by sharing knowledge, information, assets, and communication channels. These tools are useful throughout the project lifecycle, especially during the planning stages of new projects.
Is Zoom a collaboration tool?
Zoom has become an indispensable and ubiquitous collaboration tool that makes creating and participating in video conferences, meetings, and webinars fast and easy. A simple interface supports video meetings with up to 1,000 people and sports options for creating breakout rooms for smaller team brainstorming sessions. And since everything can be recorded and transcribed, sharing with other team members asynchronously is easy.
Does Office 365 have collaboration tools?
Office 365, Microsoft’s online version of its popular Office suite, provides a variety of powerful collaboration tools for teams that prefer the traditional approach to business software. Office 365 also features Microsoft’s cloud platform, OneDrive, for easy sharing of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files.
Also worth mentioning is SharePoint, which is a powerful web and content management system that provides internal websites and portals used for collaborating across teams.
Create tight-knit teams with collaboration tools
Collaboration is all about teamwork, and it really is what makes the dream work. Whether you’re a project manager or a product owner, giving your devs powerful collaboration tools will empower them to do their best work and create products that dreams are made of.
Get started