While creating an awesome software it’s important to be efficient and have maximum collaboration. There are lot of tools to make developers life easier nowadays, each with it's own advantages and disadvantages. Today I’d like to share what apps and services we are using daily in our work. READMORE

Communication: Slack

• Pros: Cool. Convenient chat-rooms. Integrations. File sharing.
• Cons: A heavy app client, that occasionally lags.
• A tool that became essential for us from first days of our work. We use it to communicate with clients, to chat with team-members, to gather food orders, to track latest tech-tweets, to share links and files. Ability to edit message during 5 minutes. Besides that in paid version the messaging history is saved becomes really handy when you’re looking for some lost file or detail that was approved by client in the past (◕‿◕)

Task management: Trello

• Pros: Easy. Intuitive. Filters!
• Cons: When boards have too many cards - it gets clumsy, performance for moving cards, a search is slowed down significantly.
• We have looked through many applications that help to manage tasks, and Trello was chosen for its simplicity - new member can set it up and get where we are in couple minutes. File uploads, integrations, mobile app - great benefits to us. Also, clients also can easy track the progress that is really visual when you look at lists and what cards are on it.

Time tracking: Everhour

• Pros: Customizable reports. Trello integrations. Browser extension. Responsive support.
• Cons: Occasional downtimes. No API.
• A well-done product that is rapidly developing. We are tracking time on tasks that we perform so trello integration is really handy and you can use a browser extension (Chrome, Firefox, Safari). Beside tracking on the Trello tasks you can create you can set list of tasks per project/team (like “weekly meeting”, “helping teammates”, “investment time” etc).

Bug tracking: Appsignal

• Pros: Customizable bug reports. Slack, Trello integrations.
• Cons: Can’t assign User right inside the application (so you are not sure if a problem is solving at the moment by some team-member). Takes time to set it up in a right way you need.
• Bug reports are coming to dedicated slack-channel so every team-member can check out what has happened.

Continuous integration: CirceCI

• Pros: Quick setup. Perfect for test suits. Responsive UI.
• Cons: Hard to set complex notifications. Upgrades without warnings.
• Whenever a new commit is pushed to GitHub, CircleCI runs the tests that have been already defined and if none of them fails gives a green marker for code review.

Deploy: Deploybot

• As we primary using XP practices, fast delivery is essential for us. Since someone has merged approved pull-request to Master it can be immediately deployed to Live with help of Deploybot. Decreases bottleneck and keep access to Live server secured.

Mail catcher: Mailtrap

• Pros: Nice UI. Detailed email info.
• Cons: Haven’t noticed any
• Great, simple integration that can be installed to your staging server to test email services and deliveries. Basically, catches all emails from selected server and shows all needed email details.

Code repository: Github

• Pros: Most commonly used among developers with our stack. Open-source libraries
• Cons: You have to pay for every private repo.
• We are using it for all our projects. And it was built using Ruby on Rails ;)

Google services: Mail, Calendar, Drive, Docs.

• Pros: Proven. Reliable
• Cons: UI (calendar is sooo boring!)
• Google ecosystem allows managing all these services pretty easy. Hard to add something here

Money sharing (ಠ‿ಠ) Splitwise

• When it comes to ordering some pizza or sushi for lunch - someone pays for it and makes a record in the app who owes him for what. We found Splitwise as an extremely convenient app as it takes out a headache for money splitting and debt control.

Conclusion

As you probably noticed we pick our tools by principals: simple, integrative, user-friendly, proven and that has responsible support. Do you have in mind other alternatives or tools that can be helpful? Please, share with us.

Peace to all! (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧