Keeping your developers productive comes with a range of benefits. For starters, it ensures fast or on-time delivery of all projects but also allows these employees to be more innovative and think outside the box.
Whether you are doing IT project outsourcing with developers from all around the globe or have an in-house team, keeping everyone happy and productive is one of the best ways to speed up projects and maximize your ROI.
In today’s guide, we are showing you some of the best productivity tools for developers that make it easy to set priorities, track projects, and, most of all, boost your developer productivity in a meaningful way.
The Best Productivity Tools For Developers
If you have been looking for development tools that boost productivity, you are in the right place. The list below shows curated tools that are meant to fasten and improve programming but also boost your team’s efficiency. Let’s begin reviewing each of these.
1. Asana
Asana is a big name in the world of project management tools and one that is closely related to increased productivity. The goal of the app is to stay organized and connected, and for developers, some of the highlights can be seen through the ease of managing the team’s work, projects, and tasks in one place.
The centralized dashboard helps streamline communication across different companies and teams. It is also customizable, allowing users to break down their projects into tasks and set realistic goals.
Lastly, Asana is made so that it can be easily integrated with other apps that businesses use, such as Google Drive and Outlook. Even if you are selling on Amazon, you can connect Asana to Amazon Seller Central and integrate both apps, easing your workflow.
2. Enhance UI
Enhance UI is one of the best VS code tools out there and a great solution if you are looking for software that helps you learn and execute some of the best design principles. From rules to guidelines, developers can learn and follow some of the best practices such as where to place buttons, how to contrast and balance their colors, how much spacing to include, etc.
Among the other features, you can find instructions on how to fix coding issues like typos and missing closures, and the tool will explain functions or syntax and how everything works. There are insights on how to refactor programming functions, create regular expressions that are hard to code, change languages from JavaScript to Python, and a lot more to boost your productivity.
3. Codeanywhere
The real highlight at Codeanywhere is the code editor, which empowers developers to work with some smart editing features, add breakpoints through a debugger, inspect call stacks, etc. The software constantly analyzes codes through the coding process via its unique tool, offering straightforward collaboration for developers in real-time. Many remote teams use Codeanywhere in their palette of application lifecycle management tools – the software tailors to remote workers and offers support in 75 different languages.
For those of you who are new to this term, Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is basically the group of all people, tools, and processes involved in the development lifecycle of software applications, from initial organization to final deployment. So, if you have an active development environment, Codeanywhere is the right solution for your needs.
4. V2 Cloud
V2 Cloud is a cloud-based desktop virtualization solution provider that provides complete access to a full Windows desktop from anywhere, with any device. It's crucial to have the right infrastructure when working with a hybrid policy to boost better collaboration and productivity.
With V2 Cloud, distributed teams can accordingly give members access to a multi-user Windows operating system with Microsoft Office and all business applications that employees and consultants require. All are accessible 24/7 from any computer, phone, or tablet.
V2 Cloud ensures high availability, reliable performance, and secure access for your business and development. In addition, V2 Cloud makes it incredibly easy to set up your virtual cloud environment in 20 minutes without any in-depth training or certifications.
5. ConceptDraw for macOS
Developers working in the macOS ecosystem can utilize this tool and explore a great number of diagrams to represent information according to some of the best visualization techniques. You probably know the value of diagrams in the development industry – one can be understood as a great kind of visual display, showing qualitative data with shapes connected with arrows, lines, and other visual links.
The fishbone Ishikawa template is a good example of a visualization tool that categorizes the potential causes of a problem, used in order to identify a problem’s root causes. Now, there is a range of such Ishikawa diagrams within ConceptDraw, making it easy for developers to visualize data and prevent issues or unexpected scenarios.
6. Habitica
With Habitica, you can digest your tasks in a game-like interface, making it easy and enjoyable for you to work. Developers will receive points and be leveled up once the task is completed. There is a rewarding system that works great for everyone (especially offshore software developers) as it incentivizes each worker to find pets, collect coins, and make progress in their work.
Besides the gamification interface, Habitica is a great tool for developers who want to track their habits and goals. Once they are signed in, they need to create their character and motivate other users to complete tasks in real-life, get gold, unlock custom rewards, and a lot more.
7. The Silver Searcher
Another tool that is beyond helpful for developers is The Silver Searcher. With this one, you can search for code and get results instantly fast. The ultra-fast processing speed, boolean queries, hex dumps, and many other features make it one of the most popular productivity tools for developers that actually contribute to major time savings.
You can use this tool to search for code cross-platform and find the specific instance of code within a file – even if it’s thousands of lines of code. While many compare it to Ack (another similar tool for developers), The Silver Searcher is 34 times faster than this competitor.
8. LakeFS
LakeFS is an open-source tool that works with object storage data lakes. It is very popular among developers working with cloud storage and a system that bases its processes on data lakes, which usually store files or blobs in raw format and through a repository.
You can experiment with LakeFS and play around with the development environment based on your data. It uses a Git-like scheme, which allows for using new data in another branch without affecting your main branch. You can eventually merge both branches safely once each aspect of new data checks out.
9. Lightrun
Every developer knows that bugs are unavoidable and present almost everywhere. Bug reports are often the first places where these tend to show up. Once they do, the primary task is to track down the logs and attempt to replicate the bug, and figure out how to fix it. However, if there aren’t any logs or there are not enough of them, trying to solve this problem can also become a problem of its own kind.
Since it is able to solve problems and help customers in real-time, Lightrun is also known as one of the best CX tools out there. It allows you to add logs, metrics, and traces to code directly from your IDE or CLI. On-demand and in real-time, the tool enables you to gain code-level observability without any need to deploy.
10. Semaphore
Semaphore is a CI/CD tool that is meant to maximize developer productivity in many ways. Some of its main features include test reports, mono repos, and self-hosted agents, and it has great use cases in the iOS, Android, and Docker & Kubernetes ecosystems.
The goal of this software is to optimize workflows and support complex deliverables with flexible pipelines. It works on any language and any platform. excels when it comes to debugging failures and can be used to model any DevOps workflow.
11. zipBoard
zipBoard is a web-based annotation and visual feedback tool for almost all types of content. It lets you annotate on images, videos, webpages (static and live), SCORM, PDFs, etc. The tool simplifies your visual bug tracking & QA process for reviewers. With zipBoard, you can review all your online proofs on a centralized platform and get rid of the endless email chains and screen-sharing meetings.
The vast array of annotation tools inside zipBoard allows you to markup directly on top of your screen and share them across the team and stakeholders. It has an easy-to-use, simple UI, which is especially useful while getting feedback from non-technical clients and stakeholders.
Lastly, there is no need to create an account for guest collaborators. The software allows you to assign and prioritize the tasks directly from the dashboard. Also, you can restore to previous versions and revert changes with a clear designation of roles. All of this makes zipBoard a useful tool promoting confusion-free collaboration for all, whether you’re an agency or an individual.
12. Tuple
Last on our list of productivity tools for developers is Tuple. This software works as an integrated remote pair programming app for macOS that allows developers to collaborate in real-time and prevents coding mistakes. The main feature is talking and coding in a shared environment (that won’t eat up your CPU).
With Tuple, multiple developers can contribute in one-on-one environments and have a mouse and keyboard each. By doing this, you won’t have to wait for your coding partner to finish what they are doing so that you begin – you can code, collaborate and chat at the same time!
13. Trust.Zone
If you want to prevent your ISP from seeing your Internet browser history but also some of the projects your developers are working on, Trust.Zone is a software solution to consider. The VPN will encrypt and route all of your traffic through the Trust.Zone VPN network, protecting your privacy and preventing any data leaks.
Conclusion
As you can see in the list above, there are many new programs worth trying and many new solutions that do save time for developers. All of these go a step beyond tools such as an employee time clock calculator, offering developers a dedicated approach to increased productivity.
Our goal with this guide was to feature as many programs as possible but also list out apps that are unique in their own way. Besides their main function, all of these apps are designed to be more disciplined and productive for any web development specialist.
We hope that this guide will help you find the right tool for your team and automate your tasks in a better way!
Check out the 5 best free project management and productivity tools and choose the one that fits your requirements.
Our list starts with Asana.
