Everyone wants to enable their development teams to be as productive as possible, and AI-enhanced tools are some of the most talked-about options right now. Before you get into the world of artificial intelligence, however, there are a whole host of tools that development teams have been using for over a decade to stay productive.
In the modern work environment, they’ve become absolute necessities — so before you start rolling out expensive new AI workflows, it’s important to ensure your teams have access to them.
The Productivity Tools Every Dev Team Needs
There’s a running theme with productivity tools for development teams — they focus on enabling communication, collaboration, and organization.
Project Management Tools
Projects progress smoothly when everyone is on the same page, and project management tools are the ultimate way to achieve this. Atlassian’s popular Jira tool allows development teams to create tickets for the tasks they’re working on, allowing other teams, project managers, directors, and anyone else in the company to see what’s going on.
This is essential for sharing information and avoiding misunderstandings. We all know how easy it is for development teams and management teams to fall out of sync — non-technical managers don’t always know what signs of “progress” to look for, so they push to see the kinds of metrics they understand. These often don’t fit into the practicalities of how development teams work, putting pressure on engineers and affecting morale.
Project management tools are a great compromise here, reducing time loss and stress amongst developers and keeping management informed. It also helps team members keep track of what others are working on, enabling them to make smart decisions when they need to borrow some manpower or lend someone to another team.
Documentation Tools
Developing software is a messy process. With millions of lines of code to contend with and potentially hundreds of people working on different features and fixes, it’s impossible for everyone to know how everything works.
This is where documentation comes in. Most companies have a Docs team for creating customer documentation, but it’s also essential for developers to have their own documentation. Atlassian’s Confluence tool is one of the oldest and most popular documentation platforms out there, allowing developers to explain the changes and features they implement in a structured and searchable knowledge base.
That way, when someone runs into a problem without an obvious fix, they can easily check the documentation for answers before resorting to the time-consuming process of pinpointing the code owners and messaging individual developers.
Agile Methodology
Because software development varies in so many ways from more traditional business projects, new project management methodologies have appeared to make things easier. Nowadays, the vast majority of development teams choose the agile methodology.
Agile focuses on shipping changes in small, frequent increments to maximize feedback and encourage constant edits and improvements to long-term plans. The specifics are left up to individual teams to decide, but two-week sprints within tight-knit teams are a popular way to implement agile.
These two-week sprints help teams ensure they don’t get bogged down in the planning phase — bugs and problems are so unavoidable and unpredictable that it’s impossible to try and address every issue beforehand. It’s far better to start coding and “make it work” first, allowing you to get a better picture of what needs to be done to fix problems and avoid breaking things elsewhere in the code base.
Cloud-based Hosting Solutions
Waiting will always be a big part of the software development process — waiting for builds, waiting for tests, waiting for pull requests to get approved — but this doesn’t mean some things can’t be sped up.
For example, TensorWave gives you on-demand access to powerhouse GPUs like the AMD MI325, enabling your developers to speed up builds or LLM training when they need to. With pay-as-you-go pricing, continuous upgrades, and complete scalability, cloud GPU platforms allow you to direct extra compute to wherever your team needs it.
Communication Channels
Smooth communication is probably the single most important thing for development teams. Many task-focused tools will have communication channels built in for related topics, but having a global platform for communication is essential.
Slack is one of the most robust and popular tools for this purpose. Teams can create channels for every topic necessary. For instance, the owners of a particular feature might have an internal channel for development discussions, an open channel for sharing updates with other teams, and an external, customer-facing channel where case managers and important customers can send questions or flag urgent bugs.
Organizing communications like this is incredibly helpful as it ensures the right questions find their way to the right people, and it minimizes the chances of messages getting lost in the noise.
Direct messages are also important, making it easy and instant for developers to contact each other. When you’re receiving a lot of messages, you can even flag them so you don’t forget to come back to them later.
Many company Slack servers incorporate social channels as well, where employees can discuss hobbies, arrange activities, and generally get to know each other.
Collaboration Tools
Lastly, developers need tools that allow easy collaboration while coding. GitHub is the most well-known tool in this category, allowing people to share work, make pull requests, review code, and more. There are also pair-programming tools like VisualStudio’s Live Share, which enable real-time collaboration on code, just like Google Docs does for documents.
Final Thoughts
Complex projects call for robust, customizable, and structured tooling. Without these tools, development teams have little chance of achieving legitimate productivity levels. It’s also important to note that adding AI-enhanced workflows to a team without the proper foundational tools could be disastrous.
Enabling individuals to produce more work in less time would cause teams to grow out of sync even faster, and for projects to progress in the wrong direction much more quickly before being corrected.
