Skip Your Next Meeting With These Simple Alternatives

A new feature was due before a code freeze days before Christmas. We’d committed to a release before the end of the year and the project was not going well. There was a bug in some changes to the pricing algorithm and the original author had checked out for the holiday. My colleague and I were in the cafe trying to figure out what changes needed to be made. There was no automated testing. The system was a black box, and every push needed our QA counterpart’s blessing which took hours. Did we make it on time? Yes, but it was not a release we were proud of. Is this how coding is supposed to be? Can this scale? What could be done so that we don’t find ourselves repeating history next year?

As development teams grow coordinating among team members is a challenge every company needs to solve. The way in which work gets done is evolving. A recent trend over the last few years is that more and more companies are hiring remote employees. This could be to reduce costs, expand the hiring pool, make companies more elastic, and provide more flexibility to employees. A view of interest over time for “remote work” illustrates this trend pretty well.