By Ashley Dotterweich
Collaboration tools can create friction — or they can minimize it
Start by taking a hard look at the tools your team is using. “If a tool can remove the toil from around coding — and from every role that involves coding, including planning, creating, and fixing — then it has a fair shot at supporting collaboration across all aspects of the software development process,” says analyst Jason Bloomberg. 
While there are many, many tools available to help developers manage, track, and automate every granular process, tool, and workflow in their stack, those tools can create more work for the team than the value they provide. Even collaboration tools that try to integrate tools together can create issues.
“Such platforms can certainly provide value — especially when compared to a mishmash of disconnected tools — but they constrain the way the development team wants to work,” Bloomberg says. “Instead of supporting collaboration, they dictate it, or worse: they offer superficial collaboration capabilities that don’t integrate well with existing tools.”
For tooling to truly move the needle on reducing toil and facilitating collaboration, it must offer the capabilities needed to accelerate developer workflows and processes effectively.
