COVID-19 hit the ground running and the world felt the impact. Although tech companies seemed to be ahead of the curve by allowing their teams to work remotely, transitioning to full remote overnight is not easy.
The immediate pain point is communication. This is why tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Hangouts, Sococo, and Skype are crucial during this new reality. And this is also why teams are focusing on redefining communication policies, learning how to conduct meetings, how to document and share information and, finally, adapting their culture to a remote reality. New guides are being published every day to help us stay sane, help us work better together, or to help us cope with life and family.
But, just as important as communication, teams are concerned with the quality of output, efficiency, and productivity under this reality. Although being in lockup is completely new, remote teams are not, and there are already a group of tools that can support you in better coordinating and managing your delivery process in a remote and often asynchronously setting.
From another equally important perspective, the bar for software security has continued to increase at the same pace, arguably even faster. As a business, maybe you’re seeing larger demand which will surely test your applications and security best practices. Or maybe your business is redirecting resources and attention to new markets or products. Regardless, in a world where syncing between teams is harder, security cannot be your weakest link. Investing in the right tools will automate your protection and let you focus on the right priorities for your team and your business.
While some bosses are panicking and buying monitoring software to keep tabs on their remote employees, we suggest a different approach. An approach where teams set up their own standards, ensure security best practices, agree on what quality means to them, and simply move on.
Look after code quality in a remote setting
Now that our colleagues are not at arm’s length, it’s important to automate processes and to ensure that all of your team follows the same standards. This will allow developers to make decisions independently since conversations during manual reviews, pair programming and spontaneous discussions at the office might be less frequent.
With Codacy you can define rules per repository and enforce those as quality gates – any pull requests that are not up to the standards that your team defined will be blocked. This automated standardization process will ensure that the same rules and the same overall quality definition is applied to different repositories or even different teams.
Codacy can also help you to also centralize all quality data so that you can see a current diagnosis of your project quality, see the evolution over time and a quality forecast if pull requests are merged without addressing the problems identified.
Integrated into your workflow
Codacy can be integrated into your workflow to provide feedback where your team usually reviews their code – whether it is GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket. Once you or your teammates create a pull request, you will have your code reviewed and have access to clear feedback about best practices not being followed, error-prone code, compatibility, performance, security, duplication, and coverage.
If you are using tools like Jira or Slack to make remote work more effective, you can:
- Create Jira issues from Codacy, allowing you to keep your backlog organized, or
- Send new issues found to a Slack channel and notify developers in real-time, without the burden of setting up additional meetings or processes.
An effortless remote code review workflow
Ultimately, Static Code Analysis tools like Codacy will help you on three main aspects:
- Quality standards are followed by different teams on different projects while giving the flexibility to define what quality means to your organization
- Ensure you don’t lose sight of security by reporting security issues and their severity
- Makes the code review process more efficient, which saves time during development and prevents overlooked problems from going live.
If you use GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket feel free to sign in to Codacy and give it a test drive. Or, if you want a quick demo, just reach out to us. And, if you are wondering, it’s free for COVID-19 related projects.
