How to Use Project Development Tools in a Remote Coding Team

Team CS Boys. Members: Ryan Richardson, Brandon Joseph, Christian Polydor and Maxwell Anderson

Problem Statement

In class, computer science (CS) students become very proficient with coding and problem solving. But as students transition from university into their professional careers, or as even coursework becomes more online and digital, it is becoming increasingly important that they understand not just how to write software, but how to develop in an organized way and coordinate with others. The purpose of this guide is to provide a document that teaches students these practices and, specifically, how to use the most important and common tools for this in industry.

Specifically, this guide will include how to set up meetings and project management tools such as:

• Trello to promote easy and clear development

• Visual Studio Code (VS Code) which promotes remote development through some extensions

• Git with GitHub to promote remote development through version control

All of this will culminate in a document that CS students can use whenever they are working remotely and are working in groups. The organization method would be a user document, that goes into detail on our three applications for CS students. We will split each application into its own parts that go into how they could help CS students working remotely, and show how each is used to augment the development process.

Background of Problem

The unique circumstances of COVID have put an increasing importance on asynchronous and remote work. Usually computer science students can just meet in person with your team to ensure they are doing work, but due to COVID, you had to instill trust in your team. One study of virtual team dynamics showed that online collaborative tools, such as Trello and GitHub, can facilitate more active learning environments [1]. Through our time in project-based CS courses and remote internships, we have found three applications: Trello, VS Code, and GitHub, that help ease remote work and increase group productivity greatly.

These applications enable users to perform tasks beyond just writing code - such as version control and team collaboration - they have become not just common, but ubiquitous in industry. We selected Trello, VS Code, and GitHub since they are often used in industry:

• Trello has over 39 million registered, as of 2019 [2]

• In a 2019 developer survey conducted by StackOverflow, VS Code was the overall most popular code editor [3]

• GitHub stores remote repositories for over 2.9 million organizations, including 35 of the Global Fortune 50 companies [4]

Yet students do not really learn these aspects of project management and team software development in class, so they inevitably have to get “up to speed” with them when they finish school and pursue careers in industry.

Numerous studies have shown increased productivity as a result of using Trello [5], Visual Studio Code [6], and GitHub [7]. It is clear, then, that knowledge of these kinds of tools is more important than ever. So there is an opportunity and great value in creating a guide that is designed to teach students to use them.