Remote working can be a blessing for every parent. In that way, you don’t have to face tough dilemmas like “staying at the office to finish fixing that bug” versus “returning home early to do some karaoke with your children”. Being a working parent used to be all about making tough calls in terms of career or childcare.

Remote work has been steadily gaining popularity for some years now. According to an article published by smallbizgenius, in 2019, the number of people who work from home has increased by 140% since 2005. Now, most of the population is working from home. For most of the companies that had not adapted work from home before, this time has been an eye-opener. Many companies including the big ones like Twitter, Barclays, Mondelez are allowing employees to continue work from home indefinitely.

Working from home is the new norm for teams all over the world. For software development teams, adapting to the new working environment has been going on for more than one month now. To further understand the challenges of working (or testing) remotely, we conducted a quick survey on the state of working from home for the testing community.

We're all remote workers today. There has been a ton of amazing information published by some of the leading remote companies about how to work remotely, but we haven't seen much that talks about what kind of company culture is necessary for remote work to thrive. Having done this for 8 years, I can confidently say the 'soft stuff' is as important as tooling and process. To that end, I asked our team (over Slack, naturally) to share their tips on how to thrive as a remote worker.

“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” – a famous quote by Hellen Keller is very much valid even in current times, especially in the context of teamwork. The relationship between any two people is considered good when communication between them is healthy. And on the same lines, a team is able to work ‘together’ better when their communication is strong.

2020 isn’t half done and society has already changed fundamentally. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many people into unemployment because customers can’t visit their stores anymore. When revenue drops, business owners have to ask themselves: What part of their workforce is crucial to operating the company? For companies that sell software services to developers, you could get the impression that a “developer relations” (DevRel) team could be critical for that company.