Solution guide series

Remote Development:
A Guide to
Building Resilience
 July Table of contents 02
2020

Explore remote
development
goals

03 / 06 / 09 /
Introduction Manage remote developer Summary
teams

04 /
Keep developers productive
07 /
while working remotely Securely and rapidly release
software

05 /
Collaborate from anywhere
08 /
Recruit top developer talent
 July Introduction 03
2020

Learn to empower As the need for resilience grows,

organizations are accelerating their transition

a critical group to—and reliance on—remote development.

However, as development teams shift to

of people in your a distributed model, many organizations

will struggle to keep developers productive

organization without in-person collaboration or high-

powered machines at their desks.

The key to building resilience is enabling

your developers to code, collaborate, and
ship securely from anywhere. By allowing
developers to build and deploy apps with
cloud-hosted environments and remote-
capable tools, you help them maintain
productivity while remote—or even improve
it beyond previous co-located levels.

In this guide, learn to empower a critical

group of people in your organization: the
developers you rely on for internal and
customer-facing app innovation. Plus, find
ways to safeguard your code and your
software supply chain as well as develop
more effective operations for remote teams.
 July Keep developers productive while 04
2020 working remotely

Keep developers Equip developers with top-rated tools

built for distributed teamwork, augment

productive while dev boxes with cloud environments, and

increase efficiency with AI.

working remotely

Questions to consider Recommended activities

1. What processes and tools do you provide Catalog your developer toolchain and
your developers with to help them code find solutions that enable more secure
remotely, on demand? remote connectivity and productivity.

2. Could your highly skilled developers spend Track the time developers spend on non-
more of their time and energy contributing project tasks like setup and logistics, then
success to projects? seek technologies to reduce it.

3. Could your developers reduce their See how quickly your developers spin up
development environment setup times? new environments, then explore cloud-
based solutions to increase efficiency.

4. Could your team streamline the remote Identify methods and technologies to
onboarding process for new projects or help developers more easily onboard new
when developers join the team? team members to projects.

5. Are your developers able to use a variety Evaluate tools that allow your developers
of devices to complete their work? to work from anywhere—flexibly—on any
device or platform they choose.

6. Could your developers save time by Investigate opportunities to use AI to

avoiding repetitive coding or making make your developers more efficient
better use of team programming patterns? when coding.

Get started with these resources:

•  Learn to make every developer and team more productive with this Build 2020 session.
•  Learn more about Visual Studio Codespaces.
•  See how to boost developer output with AI and Visual Studio Code.
 July Collaborate from anywhere 05
2020

Collaborate from Empower distributed developer teams to

collaborate flexibly and without friction

anywhere from anywhere, and adopt open source

community practices.

Questions to consider Recommended activities

1. Could you enable more robust real-time Enable rich, seamless, live communication
communication between developers with instant messaging, audio/video calls,
working remotely? and screen sharing.

2. Are you facilitating topical discussions, Enhance developer collaboration with

information exchange, and documentation tailored virtual workspaces for project
sharing among developers? discussions, storage, and file sharing.

3. Do you notice silos forming among remote Adopt best practices for cultivating and
developers that impact team effectiveness? maintaining cohesion and inclusion for
remote workers.

4. Do your programming collaboration Identify technologies for live virtual pair

practices work for developers who programming that go beyond simple
are remote? screen sharing.

5. Does your culture incorporate developer Explore ways to bring open source best
best practices and accommodate practices into the organization—also
flexible schedules? known as innersourcing.

Get started with these resources:

•  Learn about real-time collaboration with Visual Studio Live Share.
•  Watch a Visual Studio Live Share demo.
•  Learn how to begin collaborating with GitHub.
 July Manage remote developer teams 06
2020

Manage remote Take sprint planning to the next level,

prioritize work, organize, and track team

developer teams productivity in context using integrated

developer tools.

Questions to consider Recommended activities

1. Do your developers and managers use Seek to integrate project/work item

separate tools to track projects and tracking and collaboration tools to keep
collaborate as a team? remote team collaboration in context.

2. Could your developer teams use Investigate the latest technologies and
more effective sprint planning practices practices for running sprints, stand-ups,
and technologies? and planning meetings remotely.

3. Are your developer teams aware of Find tools and processes to keep
and aligned on code changes at every developers aligned from idea to
development stage? release with all code changes linked
to work items.

4. How are your developer teams tracking Objectively track progress and maintain
team progress on goals and improving accountability across team members using
remote processes? pertinent data and analytics tools.

Get started with these resources:

•  See how to create a DevOps workspace in Microsoft Teams in this Build 2020 session.
•  Get the Azure Boards plugin for Microsoft Teams.
•  Learn more about Microsoft Teams.
 July Securely and rapidly release software 07
2020

Securely and rapidly Maintain release velocity and

app security by taking advantage

release software of automation, monitoring app

performance, and accelerating
threat detection.

Questions to consider Recommended activities

1. Are your developers able to securely ship Automate lifecycle workflows with tools
code from their remote work locations? and processes that let developers securely
distribute code from anywhere.

2. What are your developers’ current Reduce time and money spent on dev/test
challenges spinning up development and environments with more efficient, cost-
testing environments? friendly cloud-based solutions.

3. How confident are you in the security of Strengthen your security posture—scan
your apps and your software supply chain? code, find vulnerabilities, and fix security
issues in dependencies using AI.

4. Could your remote developers improve Explore how remote developers can use
how they stay connected, monitor code tools to retain full observability into apps,
health, and track performance? infrastructure, and the network.

5. What is your governance approach for Ensure your toolchain prioritizes

ensuring compliance? compliance without overburdening
your developers.

Get started with these resources:

•  Learn to deploy using GitHub Actions for Azure in this Build 2020 session.
•  Get the GitHub Actions for Azure repository.
•  Learn more about Azure Monitor.
 July Recruit top developer talent 08
2020

Recruit top Maintain hiring continuity and remove

candidate location constraints with

developer talent virtual technical interviews using tools

developers know and prefer.

Questions to consider Recommended activities

1. How resilient is your hiring process when Identify tools to help maintain continuity
in-person interviews aren’t possible? when in-person interviews are not
an option.

2. How could you expand the diversity of Use remote interviewing tools and
perspectives and talents within your processes to support creating a more
developer workforce? geographically diverse candidate pool.

3. How effective are the tools you use in Explore ways to use the coding toolset your
technical developer interviews? candidates are familiar and comfortable
with during technical interviews.

4. How do you validate that developer Evaluate candidate competency in

candidates’ skills are a match with what technical interviews using the same
you need? toolset your team uses to produce code.

Get started with these resources:

•  Read tips and tricks for conducting remote interviews with Microsoft Teams.
•  Learn to do technical interviews with Visual Studio Live Share.
•  Learn more about Visual Studio Live Share.
 July Summary 09
2020

Build resilience When you empower your developer teams

to code, collaborate, and ship securely from

through your anywhere, you enable them to be more

agile. Their agility gives your organization

developers the ability to rebound from shocks and

capitalize on emergent opportunities.

Tools and services play a big role in

enabling remote development, which
contributes to organizational resilience.
With Microsoft, get an unmatched end-
to-end cloud platform that meets all
your remote engineering needs—for the
individual, team, and organization. And
because the entire Microsoft developer
toolchain is integrated, you’ll create a
seamless remote development experience
that maximizes resilience and minimizes
your time and cost investment.

For help and guidance building resilience

with remote development—such as
checking off the boxes in this guide—start
a conversation with our sales advisors.

©2020 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This

document is provided “as-is.” Information and views expressed
in this document, including URL and other Internet website
references, may change without notice. You bear the risk of
using it. This document does not provide you with any legal
rights to any intellectual property in any Microsoft product.
You may copy and use this document for your internal,
Contact us reference purposes.