Working Remotely: Best Practices for Distributed iOS development

2020 was the year so many businesses were pushed into remote work to survive. The number of Americans working remotely more than a day a week has exploded from less than 25% to more than 67%. And, for many, it has been popular. Working remotely will be more common, even after the global pandemic has passed.

Remote work in software development isn’t anything new. Just ask those with experience in distributed software development.

There are some important lessons we’ve learned over the years on how to do work remotely well. There are benefits that help both employees and employers. I’ll go through the most important best practices you’re going to want to put in place. This will ensure remote work supports your capacity to build great iOS apps without slowing everything down.

The Benefits of Remote Working

As an independent developer, I have a bias for remote work – I’ve been working remotely for almost 10 years. I’ve noticed major benefits:

Dealing with Home Life - It makes it easier to adapt to changing circumstances in your work and home life. If a project you’re working on needs your attention unexpectedly, or one of your children is home from school sick, it's much easier to adapt with everything you need within easy reach.

Saving Time and Money - Working from home saves an enormous amount of time and money that you may not be aware of until you try it. It is estimated that, before COVID-19, the average American was spending 225 hours a year – more than nine calendar days – commuting. As well, the cost of car maintenance and/or public transit adds up to thousands of dollars each year. And that’s to say nothing of what other things you could be doing for your work or life with that time.

Reducing Overhead - It reduces overhead and productivity loss from commuting and needing an office to accommodate all your staff all the time. There is data that shows that, if management has a positive, trusting relationship with their staff, remote work can give employees a significant productivity boost.

Improved Flexibility - Remote working can also make the business more competitive. First, the flexibility of remote work makes it easier for employees to deliver their best work and for employers to retain them. As well, remote working usually forces a shift toward focusing on whether goals are being met, and away from performance being judged by mere presence in the office.

Some of these benefits are hampered by the fact that remote working needed to be implemented quickly. This is further compounded by complications like healthcare, loss of business, and having kids remote learning from home. However, we can reasonably expect it to get easier.

Working Remotely Best Practices for iOS Development

Get Buy-in

This should be obvious to most people, but with the regular failure of workplace transformations, the realization that the much-vaunted open-plan office did the opposite of what it was sold to do, and the additional analysis that shows such offices are excellent vectors of disease, it bears repeating. If you’re a manager, keen to implement remote work for your team, you need to make the change collaborative. If you want your developers to be effective with a remote work policy, have them be a part in creating it.

The pandemic imposed this way of work on millions in a way that they never got to have a say in, let alone prepare for.

iOS App Provisioning

App Provisioning is probably the single most important Apple-specific consideration when it comes to remote work. Apple has a chain of authority between itself and your app. This chain is designed to make sure your app is trustworthy and stable before being downloadable from the App Store. Apple doesn’t make it especially easy to understand how it works.

A Brief (as possible) explanation of iOS App Provisioning

First, there is the Apple Certificate Authority. It serves as the gatekeeper to the App Store.

When you start building an iOS app, you create a Signing Certificate. This identifies you as a developer recognized by Apple. Creating a Signing Certificate generates a key on your computer (and only your computer) that connects you to the Apple Certificate Authority.

With that done, the iOS app you’re creating is assigned an App ID, linking your app to your Signing Certificate.

Next, you must create Provisioning Profiles. These profiles declare connections between a specific build of your app and the App ID. Each profile specifies what that build is for (i.e. internal development, adhoc distribution, release to the App Store). It may also contain a list of devices where the app can be tested and distributed.

Now, why does this all matter if you want to work remotely? Because to make this work, you’re going to need to determine, for every member of your development team, who has what access to a specific provision profile, and on which machines (both in the work office and the remote office). You'll also need to decide who handles the computer with the Signing Certificate key.

It’s not especially difficult to manage once it’s done, but expect it to be a time-consuming task to set up.

I highly recommend taking a look at the Fastlane suite and their Match command to help streamline this. Also here's a great list of tech articles to help with this:

Communication

Successful remote work is almost entirely about communication. Critically, the style of communication needed for effective remote work is different from those that are successful when everyone is together. You need a different set of rules and tools for remote work communication:

Choose your tools

For many teams, there is likely already an answer to the question of what tool they want to use for communication because they’re already using one. Slack is far and away the most popular. MS Teams and Chanty are also proven and effective platforms. There are many different tools and platforms available depending on how many people are involved and the details of what they need.

Choose your communication rules

In an office, people pick up on what are usually unwritten rules of communication through context and observation. This is obviously much more difficult when your colleagues only appear as names on a screen.

To keep things running smoothly, make rules written and explicit.

How often should you reasonably wait for a response during work hours?
And work hours in which timezone?
With many channels, what information do you put in which channel?
If there are important announcements, how are those delivered?

These are just some questions for which the answers should rules or guidelines.

With asynchronous communication, you need to be open to learning new communication habits. You will need a different attitude than you do at the office. People will not always message you back right away. If you need to talk to someone about something important, schedule a meeting.

For more details on how to communicate remotely, we did a podcast episode on this very topic. We talked with Jacob Gorban who has been leading remote work for over 10 years at his company Apparent Software. Not only do we talk about communication, but also keeping teams productive, managing iOS development and more.

Training/Code Review Planning

You will want a remote work-specific process for code review and feedback, especially for junior developers who need mentoring. How you handle this up to you: you might schedule meetings between senior developers and juniors, or even (when conditions allow) having them meet at the office.

Working Remotely Doesn’t Work For Everyone

There are some conditions where remote work probably isn’t an optimal policy. Much like getting buy-in, involving everyone and discussing how remote work might work should reveal if it’s a good idea. That said, there are cases where it can often be unhelpful:

Unstable or rapidly changing workflow Remote work usually succeeds when the workflow is stable and consistent (even if there are rapid changes within the project itself). If the workflow is constantly shifting, remote work can work, but you’re probably going to discover you will need to bring everyone together often to ensure they’re all on the same page.

Inexperienced teams or very old teams Remote work tends to work best with teams that already know and understand each other well. If team members are working with each other for the first time, there is no reason they shouldn’t be able to work remotely, but they should have opportunities to work together to build better rapport.

On the other hand, teams that have been together for a long time, and have up until this point only worked together in the same space, might find remote work challenging if it goes against the grain of how they’ve always worked together before.

None of this should be considered a universal rule, only that it shouldn’t be surprising if teams like these find remote work to be difficult.

Getting started with working remotely

To make remote work iOS development a successful practice, you do need to put in the work up front. A lot of it is communication-related, with some technical. Done effectively, it can be a powerful tool for your organization. It can help you develop better apps faster, and with less overhead and friction than when working together in an office.

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