Asynchronous software development: How distributed engineering teams ship faster

Many engineering teams lose significant time each week to one thing: waiting. Waiting for a code review. Waiting for a meeting where someone can explain the decision. Waiting for the one person who understands the auth module to be awake and online. Waiting is one of the costs of synchronous coordination, and it tends to get worse as the time-zone spread increases.

A quick disambiguation before we dig in. "Asynchronous software development" gets used two ways, and they're often confused. The first is asynchronous programming: the programming pattern in languages like JavaScript and Python where a program yields during I/O instead of blocking while it waits (async/await, promises, event loops). That's a non-blocking execution model inside a single program. There's already excellent material on it from MDN and official language docs.

This post is about the second meaning: asynchronous software development as a team methodology. How distributed engineering teams ship software without requiring everyone to be online at the same time. How a pull request opened in Berlin at 5 pm gets reviewed, revised, and merged by the time it's lunch in San Francisco.

In distributed teams, the biggest async failures usually aren't technical. They happen when context stays in people's heads instead of written artifacts.

This guide is written for engineering managers, tech leads, and senior developers working in distributed or remote-first teams. If you're searching for syntax and promises, the language docs will serve you better. If you're trying to make a distributed engineering team actually function, read on.

What is asynchronous software development?

Asynchronous software development is a way of building software where engineers contribute independently, on their own schedule, from written artifacts instead of real-time meetings. The core commitment is simple: no engineer should be blocking another engineer waiting for synchronous attention.

In practice, that means a handful of specific defaults. Decisions get captured in writing before they need to be made. Code reviews happen from PR descriptions thorough enough to review without a follow-up call. Architectural direction gets debated in RFCs with a comment period, not in a meeting. Status flows through written updates rather than standups. Questions get answered against searchable documentation rather than interrupting the person who last touched the code.

These practices are not new. Open-source projects have worked this way for decades because contributors were always distributed and never had the luxury of "hop on a call." What's new is the deliberate adoption of these patterns by in-house engineering teams, particularly at companies building for remote-first or globally distributed workforces.

The word asynchronous is the connection to the programming concept. Both share the same principle: don't block while waiting. In a program, blocking wastes CPU cycles. On a team, blocking wastes engineer-hours, and it compounds quickly when time zones don't overlap.

Why async-first engineering teams ship faster

Synchronous engineering teams tend to ship at the speed of their slowest meeting. Async-first teams can ship at the speed of their written artifacts, particularly across time zones, because they reduce idle wait time between contributors. The difference compounds.

Consider a simple scenario: an engineer in Berlin finishes a feature at 5 pm local time and opens a PR. In a sync-dependent team, the PR waits until the reviewer in San Francisco logs on eight hours later, asks clarifying questions in Slack, waits for a reply, reviews, requests changes, and then waits again for the author to see the feedback the next morning. A two-hour review can stretch across two business days.

In an async-first team, the PR description already contains the context the reviewer needs. Architectural decisions were captured in an RFC days earlier. The test plan is visible in CI output. The reviewer leaves detailed inline comments that the author can act on without a meeting. The loop closes in one round-trip instead of three. Research from the DORA program consistently finds that shorter change lead times correlate with higher-performing teams. Async practices reduce coordination delays that inflate lead time, which is one reason the pattern keeps showing up in high-performing distributed organizations.

There's a second-order effect that matters even more. Async teams build a written record as a byproduct of doing the work. Six months later, when a new engineer asks, "Why did we do it this way?", the answer is in the RFC, not in a former employee's memory. That institutional knowledge is compounding interest on every decision the team captures.

And there's a third-order effect that's easy to miss: many engineering leaders find that async practices can improve satisfaction, especially among senior engineers who value long uninterrupted focus blocks. Interruption-heavy cultures are expensive for exactly these people, because interruptions destroy the long blocks of focus required for hard technical work. A team that has done the work to move coordination to writing gives its senior engineers back the thing they value most.

The anatomy of an async engineering workflow

Async-first is a collection of specific practices, not a general vibe. Teams that say "we work async" but operate through a flood of real-time DMs and unscheduled calls are not async-first.

Before looking at what works, it helps to name the anti-patterns that kill async adoption in practice:

• PRs with no context. A diff with the title "fix stuff" forces the reviewer into a synchronous conversation.
• Slack-first decision-making. If the decision happens in a chat thread, it's ephemeral, unsearchable, and invisible to anyone not in the channel.
• "Quick calls" that never get documented. The call might be efficient in the moment, but the decision evaporates.
• Docs that exist but aren't trusted. If the team's wiki is stale, engineers stop reading it and start pinging people. The documentation system becomes decoration.

Recognizing these is half the work. Here's what the actual practices look like when done well.

Async code review

Code review is one of the highest-leverage async practices. It's also where most teams fail first, because reviewers run into questions they can't answer alone and default to pinging the author.

A good async code review depends on three things. The author gives the reviewer enough context to review without asking questions. The reviewer leaves comments specific enough to act on without clarification. And the tooling makes it easy for both parties to work independently.

The failure modes are predictable. Undersized PR descriptions ("fixes the bug") give reviewers nothing to work with. Vague review comments ("this seems off") force a round-trip. And the one most teams underestimate: tooling gaps that force reviewers to interrupt the author. A reviewer who can't answer "where else is this function called?" or "how does this interact with the auth module?" on their own will ping the author. That ping breaks the async loop.

A concrete pattern that works: every PR description answers three questions upfront. What problem is this solving? What approach did I choose, and what did I reject? What should a reviewer look at most carefully? Three bullet points, written in the five minutes after opening the PR, save the team multiple round-trips over the next 48 hours. It's the closest thing distributed engineering has to a silver bullet.

The reviewer's side has a mirror discipline. Every comment should be actionable without a follow-up. Instead of "this seems off," write "this allocates on every iteration, which will dominate the hot path; consider pulling the allocation out of the loop." The reviewer has already answered the author's inevitable next question. One round-trip, closed.

RFCs and written decisions

Design decisions in async teams happen through Request for Comments (RFC) documents, sometimes called Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) or design docs. The format varies; the pattern is consistent: an author proposes a change in writing, commenters weigh in over a defined window, and the author updates the document as feedback lands.

The discipline here is cultural, not technical. Engineers who grew up in sync-heavy cultures will default to "let's hop on a call" because it feels faster to them in that moment. Async-first engineers have internalized that the 15 minutes they save by calling cost the team three hours when the decision needs to be referenced six months later, and nobody remembers what was agreed.

Written standups and status updates

Daily standups translate poorly to async. What replaces them is lighter and more durable: short written updates posted on a predictable cadence, visible to the whole team, focused on blockers and decisions rather than activity. The goal isn't visibility theater. It's giving a teammate in a different time zone enough context to unblock themselves when they log on.

The format that tends to work: three bullets.

• What I shipped since the last update.
• What I'm working on next.
• What I'm blocked on.

Posted in the team's durable channel (not ephemeral chat), searchable later.

The counterintuitive part is cadence. Async standups work better at a lower frequency than sync ones. A daily written standup becomes noise; a twice-weekly one gets read. The signal-to-noise ratio of async communication is fragile, and teams that post too often find their updates ignored within a month.

The tooling async development depends on

Async development only works when the tooling removes human dependencies. If understanding the codebase requires a 20-minute call with its author, you haven't built an async team; you've built a sync team that happens to be distributed.

Three categories of tooling matter disproportionately for async engineering.

Code search and navigation

One of the highest-leverage tools for async engineering is a code intelligence platform that lets any engineer understand any part of the codebase independently. Sourcegraph's Code Search indexes every repository in an organization and returns results across all of them in a single query. Instead of asking "who wrote this?" in Slack, an engineer searches the symbol, reads the definition, follows references, and has their answer in under a minute.

This matters asymmetrically for distributed teams. A colocated team can tolerate weak code search because they can lean over and ask a colleague. A distributed team across five time zones cannot. For many async teams, code search is one of the tools that replaces the colleague you used to turn around and interrupt.

The same logic applies to code navigation: go-to-definition and find-references that work across every repository, not just the one you happen to have checked out. This matters most in large, multi-repo codebases, where reviewers often need to understand usage patterns outside the repository currently open in their editor. When a reviewer can trace a function's call sites themselves, they don't need the author awake to answer "is anyone else using this?"

AI coding agents with code graph context

The second category is AI coding agents, tools like Amp and Cursor that can reason about code, answer questions, and execute multi-step tasks autonomously. These agents are transformative for async teams, but they have a well-known limitation: they fail in large, legacy, or unfamiliar codebases because they lack the full picture of how code connects across repositories.

This is where Sourcegraph's MCP server bridges the gap. Sourcegraph enables code understanding for humans and agents, and the MCP integration gives coding agents access to the same code search and navigation tools that human engineers use. Instead of an agent guessing at how a function is called across your organization, it queries Sourcegraph's code graph and gets an accurate, cross-repo answer. The result is what Sourcegraph describes as increased accuracy and output quality for agents working in complex codebases.

For async teams, this compresses the most expensive form of tribal knowledge: the kind that only lives in a senior engineer's head. When an AI agent backed by your code graph can explain why a module exists and trace how it's used across repositories, a new contributor doesn't have to wait for that senior engineer to wake up. The same pattern applies to large-scale refactors: Batch Changes lets one author propose the same structural change across dozens of repositories without scheduling a call with every owning team. Each repo's owner reviews on their own schedule; the change lands without synchronous rollout.

Documentation and communication stack

Beyond code-level tooling, async teams need platforms that make written communication durable and searchable. Most teams converge on a similar stack: a code-hosting platform (GitHub, GitLab) for PRs and issues, a documentation system (Notion, Confluence, or a static site) for RFCs and runbooks, a long-form async messaging tool (Slack threads, Discord) for team discussion, and recorded video (Loom) for walkthroughs that genuinely need a face and voice.

The stack matters less than the discipline: decisions live in one place, that place is searchable, and "where is this written down?" has a reliable answer. Teams that treat documentation as a second-class citizen never successfully adopt async workflows, no matter how good their individual tools are.

GitLab is the most visible example of this discipline at scale. Their all-remote handbook documents how a large all-remote company operates with asynchronous communication as a core principle, not an accommodation. Their approach treats the written handbook as the single source of truth: if it's not in the handbook, it doesn't exist as policy. That level of commitment to written artifacts is what separates async-native organizations from teams that just happen to be remote.

Where async-first teams fail

Async-first is not a free win. The failure modes are specific and worth naming before you adopt the approach.

Alignment drift

The most common failure is drift. Without regular real-time touchpoints, engineers can quietly diverge on priorities, architectural direction, or the definition of "done." Two teams start implementing the same feature in incompatible ways. A senior engineer ships a library that conflicts with a direction another lead wrote up two weeks earlier, and nobody caught it because nobody was reading the same docs at the same time.

Async-first teams counter this with explicit written alignment: a visible roadmap, weekly written updates from every team, and a small number of high-signal synchronous meetings (demos, retros, one-on-ones) that are deliberately protected. The trap is thinking async means no sync. It doesn't. It means sync is reserved for what only sync can do.

Context-switching overhead

Async teams can accidentally create their own form of exhaustion: a constantly-updating pile of PRs, threads, docs, and tickets that each demand attention. Without hygiene, an async-first engineer can spend their entire day responding to notifications and never ship code.

The fix is explicit focus blocks protected from asynchronous interruptions, realistic expectations about response time (hours, not minutes, on comments; end-of-day, not immediately, on RFC reviews), and tooling that surfaces what genuinely needs attention rather than flooding the inbox.

Knowing when synchronous is better

Some work is genuinely faster in real time. Ambiguous design discussions where the shape of the problem keeps changing. Incident response. Pair debugging a nasty race condition. New-hire onboarding in the first week. Hard conversations that shouldn't happen in writing.

A useful heuristic: if you've been writing in a thread for 15 minutes and the problem keeps reshaping, escalate to a 20-minute call. Capture the decision in writing afterward, and keep moving. The written artifact is still the source of truth; the call just unblocks the moment.

Mature async-first teams are comfortable switching modes. They don't treat "hop on a call" as a failure; they treat it as the right tool for a specific class of problem. The failure is the default, not the call itself.

How to start moving a team async-first

Most teams don't need to adopt everything at once. A useful adoption order:

1. Fix PR descriptions first. It's the highest-leverage, lowest-cost change. Make "what, why, what to look for" required in every PR.
2. Institute RFCs for any decision that will matter in six months. Keep them short. Require a written decision, not just a discussion.
3. Cut one recurring meeting per week and replace it with a written update. Measure whether anyone misses it.
4. Invest in code intelligence tooling so reviewers can answer their own questions. For many distributed teams, this is one of the biggest unblockers in the PR review workflow.
5. Protect focus time and set explicit response-time expectations. Without this, async becomes a different kind of interrupt flood.

Each step compounds. None of them requires an overnight cultural change.

Async is a discipline, not a policy

Asynchronous software development is how distributed engineering teams scale without drowning in meetings. The underlying principle is borrowed from the code patterns that share its name: don't block while waiting. When applied to humans, it means writing down decisions, building PRs that review without follow-up calls, and investing in the tooling that lets engineers understand a codebase independently.

The code patterns are the easy part. The team practices are harder because they require new defaults, explicit writing discipline, and infrastructure that replaces the colleague you used to interrupt. For distributed engineering teams, code intelligence is the piece most often underinvested: when any engineer can search, navigate, and understand any codebase without having to ping half of the engineering org, async collaboration stops being aspirational and starts being operational.

Start with PR descriptions. Invest in the tooling that removes human dependencies. Write things down. The rest follows.

FAQs

What does "asynchronous" mean in software development? It has two common meanings. At the code level, asynchronous refers to execution patterns (async/await, promises, callbacks) where a program starts work and handles the result later instead of blocking while it waits. At the team level, it refers to a collaboration style where engineers work independently from written artifacts instead of requiring real-time meetings. This post is about the second meaning.

What's the difference between async programming and async development workflows? Async programming is about how code executes: not blocking while waiting for I/O. Async development workflows are about how people collaborate: not blocking a teammate while waiting for a review or decision. They share the same philosophy at different layers.

Is async development just remote work? No. Colocated teams can work async; remote teams can be fully sync-dependent. The difference is in the communication pattern, not geography. Most async-first teams are also distributed because the benefits compound across time zones, but the underlying practices (written decisions, thorough PRs, searchable documentation) work anywhere.

Do async teams still have meetings? Yes, but fewer and with clearer purposes. Demos, retros, one-on-ones, and occasional high-bandwidth design sessions remain synchronous. The change is that routine coordination (standups, status updates, most code reviews, most design decisions) moves to writing.

What tools does async development require? At minimum: a code-hosting platform with strong PR workflows, a searchable documentation system, a durable async chat channel, and code intelligence tooling that lets engineers understand the codebase independently. The last one is the piece most teams underinvest in, and it's the piece that makes the rest of the workflow work.