Top 10 Collaboration Tools for Software Development and Testing Teams
Every organization aspires to collaborate, but it is not always easy. Especially if you're talking about large corporations where workers come from various locations to support a single project. Collaboration is heavily reliant on tools, so choosing the right one for your team is crucial because it will enable you to:
Increasing the throughput of your team.
Assist team members who are separated from one another in effective communication.
Create archives to preserve your work history.
Browse the history to educate potential team members about the project.
However, with so many collaboration tools on the internet, picking the best one can be very difficult. This article aims to make filtering easier for you and your business. Here is a list of the top tools for team collaboration that will help your team members work more productively by encouraging teamwork.
Slack – Where Work Happens
Slack is an effective team collaboration tool in addition to being widely used as an instant messenger. Among its advantages are:
It enables users to categorize discussions according to their purpose or department.
Provides features such as file sharing and information searching.
Users can personalize the tool or set preferences based on the solution they need.
Slack communications happen all in one place and can be segmented by creating Channels for various topics. You can assign your users to as many (or as few) channels as you need to keep topics visible to the team members involved.
Integration with other tools and services: The list of applications you can use with Slack is already impressive, and they are adding new services all the time.
Jira - Move fast, stay aligned, and build better - together
This is a packaged tool that allows the user to create tasks and prioritize them for assignment to members of a testing team. It has gained popularity among various organizations due to features such as a customizable scrum board, reports that show the work progress of both Kanban and Agile teams, and backlog grooming, which assists project managers in designing strategies and tracking work.
Wrike – Leading Work Management Solution
You can divide your task into manageable chunks with the aid of Wrike. The test lead can thus easily monitor each team member's progress and contribution. The information is presented in a very usable format and includes financial information that you can use to confirm that the project stays within the allocated budget.
Xtensio – Create Powerful Business Content Together
The number of documents about a feature may overwhelm you as you are developing or testing software. The documents for requirement gathering, project plans, design documents, and other things might need to be reviewed. Not to mention that locating these documents in a crowded mailbox might be frustrating and time-consuming. A workspace where all of these documents are listed would be nice, right?
That's where Xtensio comes into play. To make creating and sharing documents with your team on the go simple, Xtensio provides a user-friendly cloud platform. You can create any type of document, including agendas, reports, and excel sheets. Additionally, those documents allow you to display images and videos. The built-in editor can be used to experiment with documents as well. You can add custom fonts and alter colors and backgrounds using the editor.
The best thing about Xtensio is that it gives your team overall project visibility. The documents can be organized into categories and displayed through various channels for collaboration. Everyone will be informed of the project's progress in this manner. You can manage access levels for sensitive documents. Additionally, you receive in-app notifications that inform you of any folios-related updates.
GitHub – Where the world builds software
This is most likely the repository service that is most commonly used by organizations and developers worldwide. The tool is completely free to use and can be accessed from any location. However, this team collaboration tool has only one disadvantage: limited storage space.
Asana – Work on big ideas, without the busywork
It is a cloud-based platform that all your testing team members can access from any location as long as they have a properly functioning internet connection. You can access all the information about your project through the available dashboards.
If you are a stakeholder or the business's owner, Asana will give you information about all the projects that are currently underway at your company as well as detailed information about individual projects, such as pending tasks and the person to whom each task has been delegated.
BitBucket – Built for Professional Teams
Bitbucket is a team collaboration tool developed by Atlassian, the company that owns Hipchat and JIRA. It provides its users with an unlimited number of private repositories. It does not, however, focus on open source, unlike Github. Rather, it is intended to assist developers and testers within an organization in collaborating on projects.
Trello - Collaborate, manage projects, and reach new productivity peaks
It is a cloud-based platform that allows users to organize their projects through the use of cards displayed on the dashboard. You can write on the cards, move them around, and discard them at any time. The columns on the card represent the various stages of the project. As each project progresses, the card is moved along the board. As a result, you can see the status of all the projects your team is working on.
Azure DevOps - Plan smarter, collaborate better, and ship faster with a set of modern dev services
Visual Studio Team Services, now known as Azure DevOps, allows different teams in a project to collaborate, with special tools for testers, architects, developers, and so on. Each project member can complete their assigned tasks while also connecting with the other members of the team for discussion and knowledge sharing.
Confluence – Create, collaborate, and organize all your work in one place
Confluence is a privately hosted chat service designed to help your dev team communicate more effectively.
