Often discussed and debated by developers, we are taking a business-led approach to the benefits of collaboration via Remote Development Environments. 

As part of this blog, we explore the benefits of remote Vs local development and how, with a wider focus on business operations and merchant benefits, RDE’s are increasingly being adopted by software development agencies.

Let’s first look at the obvious benefits:

• Activity Sharing  -  There are any number of reasons tasks might be passed, shared, escalated to other team members in any organisation. We’re all human! Multiple developers working together on the same project may share responsibilities over different shift-patterns or time-zones, holiday or sickness cover
• Escalation - If you have a traditional line of support where issues might be escalated to more senior staff if 1st/2nd line support are unable to rectify, then RDE’s provide a perfect hand-off since they are not tied to an individual, therefore not only is the escalation process smoother, but the whole support process can be streamlined
• Brainstorming - In our experience, seldom do developers really enjoy working in complete isolation, in fact many relish the opportunity to bounce ideas around in the hope of delivering a better product.
• Knowledge-share & Education - The best teams harvest great relationships across all levels of skill-sets and seniority. Empowerment and encouragement to junior staff is something which produces great learning abilities.

Whilst the above benefits might seem quite obvious, the fundamental improvements they can make on any team size can be vast. Reducing bottlenecks in development teams is a constant challenge for most agencies so being able to remove these barriers and also streamline the workflow can drastically improve the developer output since the activity of ‘writing code’ is not burdened with the activities (environment setup & teardown) around devops which only reduce the output of some-times high-salary, senior developers.

Benefits of Remote Development Environments

As we have seen, RDE’s has many benefits over local development. Here are some additional benefits:

• Increased accessibility for developers working remotely.
• Consistent development environments for team members, eliminating compatibility issues and reducing time spent on setup.
• Greater security by centralising code and data in a controlled environment.

In conclusion, remote development environments empower collaboration and increase productivity for software development teams. By adopting RDE's, businesses can streamline their development processes, reduce bottlenecks and improve the overall output of their development teams.

MDOQ is a market leader in the adoption of remote development environments with Magento, Mage-OS and Adobe Commerce. Along with the extensive automation and deployment pipelines, businesses of all sizes are slashing costs and implementing changes far quicker than those using the traditional agency/merchant relationship. Reach out via the Live Chat if you are interested in learning more.