We work remotely and asynchronously and that means we limit meetings and activities requiring live presence to a minimum. We have flexible working hours and we use tools that help us organize this work effectively.
We use three main tools, in order of their importance for processes:
JIRA
JIRA is our SINGLE SOURCE OF TRUTH. Whenever chaos or misunderstandings creep in, JIRA is our main reference point on the status of work, priorities of tasks and the situation with other people from the team.
We use the two main views - Sprint and Backlog. We look at the current sprint on every daily and planning. We do a quick review of the situation and update the tasks. At this point we have four columns:
- TODO - list of tasks for a given sprint sorted by priorities
- WIP - work in progress - everyone is allowed to have only one task in this column
- BLOCK - tasks blocked by other persons / external circumstances
- REVIEW - tasks that are currently in the code review
- DONE - branch was merged to master (production)
Gitlab
Gitlab is our code repository and is integrated with JIRA. Our gitflow is described in another article, and as for the process part it looks like this:
- each task in Jira corresponds to a new branch
- branch names correspond to the names of the tasks (e.g. ** Flow-42-Task-Descration **)
- Merge in a gitlab automatically moves the task to Done in Jira
Gitlab is mainly used for code review and automation of tasks (testing, linning, building packages with versions etc). We try to issue Merge Requests as soon as possible regardless of the status in Jira. Thanks to this, we can see who is working on what.
Toggle
Toggle is an auxiliary tool. It's basic functionality is measuring working time. On the one hand, it is motivating because we have a clear start of work. On the other hand, it allows you to fight for Work/Life Balance, which in the case of remote work is a big challenge.
I use functions such as:
- division into projects and tasks - thanks to this I see what I devote to how much time
- weekly reports - summary whether I was effective and what I worked on
- Pomodoro - helps to start with tedious tasks 😉
- Chrome plugin - follows visited websites