Recently I have been doing a lot of coding, and we’ve been working on some exciting things at RippleRock from Lean Coffee Table, TFS Rippler and some advanced HTML 5 charting tools. Our working atmosphere at RippleRock is pretty relaxed with a good work-life balance. As our consultants are usually spread through out the UK (and even some parts of Europe and occasionally India), we make a lot of use of technology to stay in touch with each other. We are all very driven and passionate people about what we do which also makes working remotely from each other (when we need to) much easier to do.

Morning Ritual
The morning ritual is very much the same as a co-located team, we have an early morning stand-up. I personally feel that the day hasn’t started properly unless we have one of these.  One of us will open our task board and display it to the rest of the team and we will talk about what we have done and what we will be working on next. 

Remote Pair Coding
We stay in touch using Skype for Business, Skype or Google Hangouts depending on what works best for our situation. Skype For Business is our go to app for remote pair coding. It enables either party to take control when working together. The developer who has control of the keyboard listens to the observer who directs. We can switch control by giving the observer control using Skype for Businesses “Give Control” functionality. We don’t always Pair Code when working remotely as it can be quite taxing being on a remote call for several hours, however as a team we can spot bits of work we believe will be better worked on while pair coding and when we do this, we end up with some very good results.

Feedback Loops
Because constant feedback is so important we focus on small chunks of work that are regularly committed to source control, run in our CI build and deployed to a server. This ensures we have constant feedback for our morning stand-up's. This also encourages us to try things out quickly if we are unsure on what is the best approach, because our feedback loops are so short we can afford to fail quickly and this way choose the best solution that works.

Code Reviews and refactoring
This pretty much works in the same way as co-located teams. Sometimes we pair when going over code if we need to figure out what was the idea behind some decisions. Other times code is changed and shelved as a suggestion to the developer who is having code reviewed and they can look over the suggested changes, compare and incorporate them to ensure they understand them.

Tools
Tools are not a replacement for process they only help facilitate the process especially for when we are are working remotely. The key tools we have found are as follows

• A shared remotely viewable board of work. Any kind of web based board be it TFS, Jira or LeanKit will help here to make work visible.
• Source Control basically goes without saying how important this is.
• Remote conferencing tools like Skype, Skype For Business or Google Hangout are important. Those that enable remote desktop control are even better.
• CI Builds kicked off after check-ins provide a fast feedback loop.
• Wiki or central document area. We find a Wiki for quickly jotting up helpful documentation essential and it encourages use because of how easy it is to use.