DEMO Day at Connect Week Amsterdam 2017.
A few days after Connect Week, once the team got back to their respectives places (Chihuahua, Hermosillo, San Luis Potosi and Barcelona), we wanted to share what we did during the event.
As you may already know we have been diving deep into bots and non-display user interfaces, so we wanted to give it a spin during these days in Amsterdam. We started experimenting with the Microsoft Bot Framework during a hackaton we participated in San Francisco in December, but we did not have enough functionality from it to be included in a production version. So we did it with the native framework from Slack.
We are obsessed with making remote or distributed teams create better working environments and for information of their tasks to flow more easily to stakeholders or product owners. Development teams have been at the forefront of remote work, with great examples such as Buffer, Basecamp, Etsy and many other companies adopting this way of work.
That’s the reason behind our Agile Retrospectives for Confluence, Scrum Poker for Confluence add-on’s and PlanningWith.Cards Hipchat Add-on. Our goal is to provide teams with all the tools need to close the loop on important issues of their projects and deliver.
Keeping in the loop.
For any team with tight deadlines and specifications of features (sometimes with no documentation) to be handed out to a client or stake-holder; it is vital that they are aligned during the whole collaboration process. That is why many teams have adopted the Standups in their daily work routine.
For those of you not familiar with Standups, we recommend to check out this video which will provide all the necessary background information so you know why many teams around the world have adopted this scrum practice.
We wanted to built a Standup Bot so that remote or distributed teams in different time zones could do an asynchronous stand up meetings with their teams through a bot service. We had the following requirements:
- The scrum master manages the bot
- The scrum master assigns a JIRA project to the team.
- Optional: the scrum master can include the bot service into a Confluence instance.
- Team members are invited to use the Standup bot service.
- The bot handles the standup status on a channel and via direct message to each member.
- The bot shows the assigned JIRA issues to each member and their last update.
- Each member updates the bot about their daily status.
- Blockers are the most important update.
- It generates a report in Confluence and JIRA
These are just some of the requirements we worked on during Connect Week, which made hacking a bot service in a week a true challenge for our development team. But we believe that bringing more tools around bot services will provide better flexibility for teams who handle various time zones.
Where a bot service excels.
One of the big insights from the week was how many teams attending the event expressed interest in bringing more tools that create a flexible environment for their teams to collaborate and most importantly stay informed in what is hurting their colleagues, this way the necessary support can be provided to help them advance and deliver.
One of the main things blocking teams from making decisions and moving forward is the lack of visibility on tasks and issues assigned to team members who are not present (either digital or physically) to be consulted on. What a daily standup does is provide the most recent point of view of the current status of the tasks assigned to each member of the team.
Sometimes it is impossible to remember everything and it is natural that important issue fall out of sight, a bot service can provide a broader view on the whole project. Letting each member know which issues have not been assigned and their due dates, driving to the forefront the most pressing tasks to deliver the features on time.
That is the reason we built and internal system which lets the scrum master push issues if their overall progress is not clear. But also allow team member to be proactive and provide the necessary updates on tasks which have not been started or are overdue.
It is vital for the service to be the “second brain” of the team, so things that do not come up during the standup can resurface when the time to deliver is near.
Standup bot in private beta.
We manage to finish an early beta of the bot service and presented it to more than 40 companies taking part in the event at the Atlassian Amsterdam office. We got some great feedback from the Confluence Dev Team and would like to give our thanks to Caroline, Kate, Matt, Bryant and Saúl who helped along the way :)
For those of you interested in being in the private beta of the Standup bot, please fill out this form to let us know you want to be part of the first beta group.
Happy Planning!
