Forem: Till Pieper

How to Use Zoom Screen Sharing for Engineering Collaboration

Till Pieper — Wed, 09 Jun 2021 20:06:58 +0000

Imagine what would have happened if the pandemic occurred just five years earlier, and software development teams, along with everyone else, had been forced to work remotely.

Videoconferencing and screen-sharing virtual meeting tools were brand new. At best, they were still quite rough. Even fewer homes had high-speed internet access than today. The only reliable way to collaborate with colleagues was to blindly discuss work through email and (gasp) the telephone. Engineers often had to adapt to new solutions.

Thankfully, that didn’t happen, as plenty of collaboration tools, including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, and others, allow virtual collaboration and screen sharing. These tools have made remote work easier.

But not every situation is the same, and neither are the screen-sharing applications that development teams use. Using these tools effectively starts by using them correctly.

Decide How (and Whether) to Meet

Like it or not, whether it’s temporary or long-term, remote work is simply a reality for software-development teams today. That means online collaboration and meetings are now easier than ever to schedule. But that’s not necessarily a good thing: employees are attending 13% more meetings than they did prior to the pandemic.

These excessive meetings have been shown to decrease productivity. One study found that videoconferencing meetings cost more than $1,200 per employee, per month, in wasted time. Not only that, but too many unscheduled meetings can reflect poorly on your organization, resulting in decreased morale and job satisfaction among employees. Most tools today are not tailored for software development and engineering. Engineers and developers need more than meetings, video calls, and screen sharing to work together. Deep collaboration is an essential tool to help teammates work together.

So, the first thing you should consider is the purpose of your meeting and whether it requires screen-sharing capabilities—or whether the meeting is even necessary. Sometimes, simply chatting or sharing a screen capture through email will suffice.

However, if your meeting involves a back-and-forth discussion, then you should consider using a screen-sharing app. For development teams, such meetings might include team meetings, customer demos, and customer onboarding meetings. In addition, internal cross-functional meetings, such as sales reviews, are also good candidates for meetings with a screen-sharing component.

The most common tools for meetings like these are Zoom and similar applications, including Webex, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. These apps allow a presenter to share their screen and also include audio/video conferencing, chat, and some file-sharing.

These tools have become nearly ubiquitous, so they’re easy and accessible for most users. Keep in mind that the screen-sharing capabilities in the tools mentioned thus far are primarily presentational. They allow one person to share their screen, and the sharing permissions can be transferred from one user to another. Screen sharing is always one way, and viewers cannot interact with, edit, or control the shared screen.

There are other alternatives specifically designed for engineering collaboration that offer more interactive and collaborative functionality. We’ll discuss those a little later. But first, let’s address some of the basics, like how to use Zoom, and then get into the issues that affect nearly all screen-sharing meetings.

How to Use Zoom to Share Your Screen

Zoom is usually the go-to conferencing tool for most of us. It’s just what everybody knows. Here’s how to use it.

First, sign up for Zoom and download it.
Then start a Zoom meeting.
Along the bottom of your meeting, you’ll see a black bar with several icons. Click the green “Share Screen.”
Then select what you would like to share. You have many options. The most popular one is to share the whole screen, but you can also share individual windows or share from your whiteboard, tablet, or phone screen.

For a more in-depth step-by-step tutorial on how to share the screen control in Zoom. This article discusses how to give screen control to another user, request remote control, regain keyboard and mouse control of your desktop in Zoom, and how to enable multiple users to share and control the mouse and keyboard at the same time while in a Zoom meeting using CoScreen.

The problem with Zoom, though, is it has limited capabilities. You get cut off after 40 minutes on the basic plan, so you usually have to pay for it if you use it enough, and their least expensive plan starts at $149.90 for a year. That’s quite an investment for someone who’s casually talking to people. Another issue is that in order to allow other users to gain control of your desktop, you sometimes have to enable it through your system preferences, which can get tricky. If that’s happening in the middle of a meeting, it looks unprofessional. A great alternative to Zoom with the capabilities to do (individual and whole) screen sharing and share control of your desktop is CoScreen.

Cover the Basics

With the use of video conferencing and screen-sharing tools increasing, time-eating mishaps and inefficiencies are also increasing. Meetings often start late or have too much time devoted to sorting out technical difficulties or users’ unfamiliarity with the software, like when you don’t know how to use Zoom.

Luckily, avoiding these inefficiencies is relatively easy. You just need to consider the basics before you start.

First, make sure you’re prepared and that everyone on your team is prepared, too. That means doing simple things ahead of time. Know what documents, files, and images you want to present and have the right windows open. Log in to any apps or sites you might need to access during the meeting. Make sure your team does the same.

If you are switching presenters, make sure the screen-sharing permissions are set up correctly. This will help you avoid delays or having to restart the screen-sharing app in the middle of the meeting, which can be embarrassing.

You’ll also want to have a dry run, ideally just before the meeting starts, to make sure everything is working correctly. This is especially important if there will be outside attendees, such as customers, in the meeting. But even having a dry run is time-consuming.

Too often, someone will be in the middle of a presentation, and something will go wrong. The information doesn’t display correctly, transitions aren’t smooth, or technology fails in some way. Most of these embarrassing mishaps can be avoided with just a little preparation. Most of these embarrassing mishaps are occupational hazards while working remotely. While preparation and dry runs are extremely helpful, sometimes those mishaps are hard to control.

Another thing to keep in mind is that many screen-sharing apps, notably Zoom, will completely take over your desktop when you’re screen-sharing. This can make it hard to toggle between windows if you need to find information, so you may want to have a second screen where you can access that information while sharing.

Finally, there are a few other things to consider as you prepare for a seamless screen-collaborating session on Zoom, Teams, or any other application:

While the presenter may want to keep their audio/video on, it’s a good idea to ask everyone else to turn theirs off, at least during the screen-sharing portion. This helps ensure that viewers with slower connections have fewer problems and minimizes interruptions. You can encourage viewers to submit questions through the chat or save them for the discussion portion of the meeting.
If you’re planning to record the meeting, make sure everyone is aware and gives explicit consent. The laws dealing with recording audio and video calls vary by state, so it’s best to cover your bases and get permission. This is especially important for meetings involving people from outside the company.
Use a resource for sharing files, along with clear instructions for accessing and downloading them. Zoom and other screen-sharing apps allow you to share files through the chat feature, but if you’re dealing with larger files, it might be best to use another source.
Follow your organization’s cybersecurity guidelines to avoid scams and data breaches.
Turn off your notifications, and close unnecessary tabs, windows, and applications. This not only keeps the meeting running smoothly but also avoids the embarrassment of personal information is on display for all to see!

There’s Sharing, and Then There’s Collaborating

While apps like Zoom, Teams, Webex, and others are great for presentations and meetings, there are times when one-way screen sharing is not enough. Particularly when your engineers are all working remotely, they will sometimes need more robust tools to be productive.

One example where a collaborative, interactive screen-sharing application is required is during pair programming. Co-located pairs had it pretty easy, as they could sit side by side at one workstation, taking turns at the keyboard while discussing the code.

Pairing remotely is a little more challenging because working at a single workstation isn’t possible. One-way screen sharing apps like Zoom offer a partial solution, allowing the driver and navigator to see the screen. But the actual work can be done on only one machine, so switching roles—a common practice in pair programming—is cumbersome at best.

Fortunately, there are tools that are designed to facilitate collaboration and project management for software development. However, these tools are focused only on a terminal or IDE collaboration. With that said, engineering collaboration and pair programming go way beyond IDE. One such tool is CoScreen. Unlike video conferencing applications, CoScreen offers features that let collaborators work together more effectively—even if they’re working remotely.

CoScreen goes beyond one-way screen sharing, letting users share windows on a joint desktop. This makes collaboration possible in ways that other video conferencing tools cannot.

With its remote-control capabilities, multiple users can interact with and edit shared windows as easily as their own local applications. So engineers can do more than just discuss what needs to be done; they can make live changes and edits.

That capability makes CoScreen well suited to a variety of use cases that developers face on a daily basis:

Pair programming and debugging: Engineers can work together as if they were at the same workstation, no matter where they are.
Creative troubleshooting: If developers get stuck, they can easily get help from a colleague and work through the problem.
Code and design reviews: Team members can walk each other through the design, and reviewers can make suggestions immediately and even test the code. *Standups and sprint demos: Everyone can align faster by seeing what the team is working on and what has the highest priority.
Ops and incident response: Engineers can share their terminals to work together to address issues in real-time.
Onboarding and coaching: Senior engineers can work with new hires to guide them through a project and provide help when necessary.

Don’t Settle for Ordinary Screen Sharing When Deep Collaboration Is Required

The software development landscape changed dramatically when teams were suddenly forced to work remotely. Nothing lasts forever, and it’s safe to say that at some point, companies will go back to co-located teams, at least to some degree. And when that happens, deep collaboration will be a vital tool.

“The dominance of Zoom and similar tools in the remote space made me seek more collaborative solutions like CoScreen, out of necessity for tools beyond just pixels on a screen with audio. We need more, and we should demand more if this is how the future of work will pan out.” - John Lilly, former CEO of Mozilla

Engineers will most likely be a great example of what these hybrid models of remote work will look like. Some engineers will spend time on-site when their presence is necessary, like when they’re taking measurements, and other times, they’ll do remote work, like drafting or doing a report, at home or off-site. Deep collaboration will be necessary between engineers who follow this hybrid model of work.

Large companies like Google and Facebook have already stated they plan to stick with remote work into 2021 and beyond. Many employees have said they want to continue working remotely as long as they can, citing benefits like eliminating commutes and spending more time with their families.

Online deep collaboration and screen sharing are simply accepted means of working, and companies need to make it as easy as possible for their remote teams to be productive. The right tools allow you to go from passively sharing a screen and displaying information to deep, interactive collaboration.

Next-gen Screenhero: Building for better collaboration

Till Pieper — Tue, 23 Feb 2021 19:46:17 +0000

Screenhero was an online collaboration tool like nothing else, right up until Slack discontinued it in 2017, leaving a void in the programming world. Fortunately, we here at CoScreen have built a brand-new tool that does everything Screenhero did (and more).

If you never got to use Screenhero, there was a reason why it became so popular: It was a tool that let its user screen-share any of your applications with any collaborator over the internet. You both were able to use your own mouse to interact with the application, making it specifically designed for remote teams. With it, you could collaborate in real-time and with any app you had on your computer. It made a lot of work that much faster and was specifically good for pair programming and for presenting to clients.

CoScreen provides people with everything they loved about Screenhero — just improved in nearly every way. It’s packed with features that tackle the needs of remote teams through an entirely new concept.

When the World Lost Screenhero

Before Screenhero, remote developers had to work using video chat and screen-sharing tools that didn’t encourage collaboration. The best solution was possibly tmux, which allowed users on Unix-like systems to access multiple terminal sessions. But it wasn’t exactly an intuitive system, unless you really knew your Linux commands.

Screenhero removed that hurdle and allowed developers to work nearly in real-time, using any app they could think of, which was a game-changer upon its release in 2013.

Not only could two people share a screen, but both could also control it with their own mouse. Clients could modify a project a developer was working on, or two developers could code together. It didn’t take over your whole screen like other video services, either.

But then in 2015, Slack acquired Screenhero, and then discontinued the stand-alone service. They intended to rebuild all of the features directly into the Slack app to offer a more efficient experience, but developers decried the new integration. Worst of all was that it lost multiplayer support, and users complained that it wasn’t as bandwidth-efficient.

And, while many of us use and love Slack on a daily basis, no one uses it for its video chat or screen-sharing. Interest in the screen-sharing service on Slack floundered, and it was eventually removed entirely.

Developers all over the internet lamented Screenhero’s loss.

Stand-alone substitutes have emerged in its place, but nothing has been quite the same. Most of the competition has just emulated what made Screenhero popular, without adding anything new.

The (Screen-Sharing) Hero Developers Need Right Now

Developers still yearn for the return of Screenhero. But rather than waiting for this long-dead hero to rise from the grave, developers can instead lean on CoScreen to meet their needs in a new way. Not only does it do everything Screenhero did (and faster!), but it also offers a superior collaboration experience and is packed with innovative new features.

Perhaps the biggest improvement is that you aren’t restricted to sharing one person’s entire screen. Multiple people can share individual windows just by clicking on a tab above each window or by dragging them to the shared screen.

See CoScreen in action
It also makes for a fundamentally more interactive (and vastly improved) user experience. No longer do you have to wait your turn while someone shares their screen — every user can share their own app anytime they wish.

Users with a second monitor can utilize it like a shared screen, allowing them to drag and drop windows from “their” computer to the shared space as they please. It’s a handy way of keeping track of what window is where. Of course, CoScreen works just as well with a single screen, and it highlights who is sharing which window. And, whereas other services only allow two users to develop software together at a time, CoScreen allows up to eight to share and collaborate concurrently.

It also offers simple remote-control features that allow users to jump right into collaboration. With it, users can manipulate other people’s windows and apps as if they were their own. To assist in collaboration, there’s even seamless video and audio chat integrated that lets users easily discuss what they’re working on.

CoScreen vs. Screenhero

Feedback for CoScreen has already been hugely positive. For example, Don Goodman-Wilson, one of the original Screenhero devs, called CoScreen “game-changing” and now even works with them.

Even at this early stage, there have been a number of success stories:

Grid AI says that using CoScreen has allowed them to build software 2x faster.
Engineers at Salesforce, Okta, and other great companies have onboarded new remote team members faster than ever.

How will you use CoScreen?

Beyond Pair Programming: How CoScreen Will Help Live Collaboration Evolve

We want CoScreen to help with all of your “deep collaboration” needs.

Interested in pair programming, but can't be in the same office? CoScreen allows developers to pair program as if they were sitting at the same workstation.

Need to troubleshoot a problem? How easy would it be to simply drag the screen over and get solutions in real-time? This works for code and design reviews as well, allowing reviewers to suggest immediate changes rather than having to wait to see them implemented.

People in an onboarding or coaching role have found CoScreen invaluable to walk new members through the process. Since you can work with everyone collaboratively, they don't have to watch as you show them what to do — anyone can work together and learn as they go.

CoScreen also offers integration with apps such as Chrome, where it can replace your meetings in Google Calendar.

And CoScreen is not just for remote work! We all may be stuck working from home, but CoScreen has applications in the office. It will allow an in-office team to communicate with freelancers or clients or even easily present demos and get feedback in real-time.

We’re constantly impressed with all the ways we see clients using our product. Also — fun fact — we use it ourselves. As a remote team, we use CoScreen daily to work on making the tool better.

A hero for today ... and the future

So Screenhero may be gone, but we think you’ll agree that CoScreen will be celebrated by anyone pining for a screen-sharing solution. The multi-user functionality makes it truly unique and uniquely suited for the problems facing remote teams. Not only is it perfect for our current work-from-home lifestyle, but it’s also perfectly suited for in-person collaboration, ensuring that you’ll use it long into the future. Drop us an email at hello@coscreen.co, and let’s chat about how we can help you!

Are Zoom And Other Work-from-home Tools Making Developer Teams Less Agile?

Till Pieper — Tue, 02 Feb 2021 21:50:02 +0000

Remember mid-March 2020, when the world shut down to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic? At that time, agile software developers and other companies had to wait helplessly for tools like Zoom and Slack to be invented so their teams could collaborate from their homes.

If you don’t remember things happening that way, it’s because they didn’t.

Video conferencing, chat, file-sharing, and other tools have been available for years, and countless companies have used them to enhance communication and collaboration. Once the pandemic hit, many of those companies quickly pivoted to using the tools as their go-to work-from-home enablers.

But can these tools replace co-located collaboration effectively over the long term? Or do they make teams less agile?

Most people would say remote-work tools are a poor substitute for in-person collaboration. Nevertheless, they are a necessary evil these days. If your team is struggling to maintain agile best practices in an age of remote work, there are some things you can do to address that problem.

Yes, working from home has made agile work more challenging in some ways

While videoconferencing and other tools undoubtedly made it easier for companies to shift to remote work, these tools weren’t designed to replace in-person collaboration. It didn’t take long for problems to arise.

Constantly looking at and talking to teammates through a computer screen is exhausting. So much so that the term “Zoom fatigue” entered the common vernacular. Experts have long known that too much time spent staring at a computer screen can cause problems like headaches, eye irritation, blurred vision, and general fatigue.

In addition, videoconferencing tools make many aspects of collaboration more difficult. Certain types of meetings are all but impossible online. Informal “watercooler” discussions and the big meetings to collaborate on big decisions are very difficult using remote tools. Spontaneity, open discussion, and broad input are challenging when everyone’s looking at a gallery of thumbnail images on their screens.

Even the simple acts of setting up and running a meeting are a little harder. Every day, variations of the following interactions are repeated countless times:

User A: Can you join my room?
User B: No, I thought we would join mine, and I'm already in it.

User A: Sorry, I can't see anything. Are you sharing?
User B: Sorry, I shared the wrong window.

User A: Can you give me presenter rights?
User B: It says that you're already a presenter.
User A: Can you please stop sharing so I can share?

But the main problem with remote work tools is that they can’t replace old-fashioned, face-to-face communication. Screen sharing is almost always a monologue. Team members are often assigned as passive viewers and struggle to get their ideas across or give instructions.

Facial cues, posture, and voice inflection communicate untold volumes of information in the blink of an eye. Video calls are a nice, temporary replacement, but the added time and effort that goes into simple communication accumulates over time, ultimately delivering diminishing returns.

All of that tedium makes the work of agile software development using remote-work tools very, very difficult. Fixing bugs, trying to come up with novel ideas and solutions, solving outages, aligning on sophisticated concepts — these are all much heavier lifts when teams have to rely on Zoom to communicate.

Agile development practices were developed with co-located teams in mind. Traditionally, such teams thrive when they’re co-located with their coworkers. This is because co-location supports frequent in-person contact to quickly build trust, simplify problem-solving, encourage instant communication, and enable fast-paced decision-making.

While co-location helps develop these close working relationships, the truth is that the agile teams that started out remote from day one can be just as effective. However, the sudden transition of co-located teams to a fully remote approach can reduce cohesion and efficiency. This has led to an alarming drop in productivity for more than 200,000 software developers worldwide.

In fact, according to a recent report from The Information, Google’s internal data shows that just 31% of their engineers surveyed said they were highly productive, an 8-point decrease from their record-high in March 2020.

Clearly, remote work is less than ideal for agile teams — at least, the way it’s being used by many companies now. But can things be better?

With the right tools, agile + remote work is possible, or even more productive

Many agile teams are very familiar with tools like Zoom and Slack. In fact, the tools have been a driving force behind some teams’ agility.

Video conferencing tools, like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Jitsi Meet, are ideal for formal meetings and sales presentations and allow people to gather quickly without travel. Chatting programs like Slack allow quick, informal information sharing and contact without flooding inboxes. These tools can actually increase the speed at which teams collaborate by removing some of the barriers of time and location.

In fact, we are finding that agile makes remote work easier in many ways. Many companies that have already embraced agile have experienced a smoother transition into remote work. These companies believe that having agile principles already in place has made their teams more effective than if they had not been agile.

Agile developers are finding that they can use video conferencing for sprint planning meetings, sprint demos, and even daily stand-ups. Some companies are getting creative and using chat tools to facilitate small talk and build office culture.

While remote tools may never completely replicate the benefits of co-location, using the right remote tools can still be used to enhance productivity and collaboration. However, remote work tools have long been seen as noisy and disruptive. They have many drawbacks, which are now being magnified because people are constantly using them.

Working from home is a necessity (for now) — here’s how to make the tools work best for your teams

Remote work is likely here to stay, at least for a while, so companies need to find ways to make the most of these tools and minimize their drawbacks. With that in mind, there are many ways to leverage the available work-from-home tools to maintain your teams’ productivity. Or even enhance it.

You’ll just need to find what works best for your company and your team.

Prioritize asynchronous workflows

The drawbacks of remote work tools aren’t with the tools themselves; it’s that they’re being used to replace in-person interactions entirely.

To counter this, companies should use the tools only when they can really add value. GitLab, for example, has processes in place to keep video calls to a minimum. According to their company communication guidelines, they emphasize documenting conclusions of offline communication, turning to synchronous video calls only after going back and forth several times.

In other words, they use video calls only when necessary, instead using chat, email, and other forms of asynchronous communication to minimize disruption.

Adapt your agile practices to remote-work dynamics

Remote work is just different from co-located work in almost every way. And, according to McKinsey, it doesn’t make sense to superimpose the way you used to operate — your schedule and processes — onto a remote work setting.

Instead, according to Smartsheet, you’ll need to adjust your approach to meetings to meet the needs of your remote teams. That means adjusting times, documenting decisions, finding ways to keep teams engaged, and maintaining calendar transparency.

You should also find ways to maintain a sense of regularity by keeping weekly touch points, daily stand-ups, and other regular touch points you used to have. This will help maintain some semblance of structure and normality in decidedly abnormal times.

Finally, you should remember that communication dynamics are very different than when everyone was in the office. People simply don’t listen and learn online the way they do in person. This makes the practice of over-communicating and repeating critical. It may seem overbearing and unnecessary, but it’s the only way to make sure there are fewer misunderstandings.

Establish and nurture your company culture online

Of all the ways remote work can be detrimental to a company, culture is most at risk when distributed work isn’t done well. Co-located teams tend to establish and maintain a culture naturally, with a little help from leadership.

That’s much more difficult for remote teams, so you have to be much more intentional about creating, maintaining, and nurturing the company culture you desire. For example, a “virtual open-door policy” helps to create a culture of open communication among remote teams. You can also explore ways for employees to get together for fun, after-work events, or online gatherings.

Taking these steps to nurture your company culture through a period of remote work, whether it’s a few more months or forever, will help establish trust among your teams and will align them to common goals and priorities, all of which is critical to effective agility.

Yes, work-from-home tools can make your team less agile — if you let them

Disruptions are simply a fact of life. We currently are in one of the most significant disruptions in most of our lifetimes, but it won’t be the last one. More challenges, big and small, are sure to come in the years ahead.

As an agile organization, you were made for times like this. The agile approach is empowering, and it allows employees to work more autonomously, and that makes you better prepared to adapt to drastic changes.

Getting the most out of your teams in an age of working from home requires that you take full advantage of the tools available. More importantly, it means adapting your processes and culture to match the reality in which we all find ourselves.

With an agile approach and an understanding of how to use work-from-home tools to their fullest, you’ll be ready for whatever disruptions and challenges the future may hold.