Introducing Stenographer
A better way to keep your team informed and highlight product changes.
At Catch&Release we have a small product/engineering team and a much bigger team that use our software for their day to day jobs. When we first started building out platform, we could simply turn around and have an impromptu meeting with everyone to explain our new features. This worked pretty well, though we would still have confusion about what was released.
Looking at the options out there, we didn’t really find much. You can invite your entire team into your task tracking software but that feels heavy handed and requires them to read through the noise. You can have someone hand generate release notes but it’s likely they’ll miss something as they scan back through your last sprints changes. Not liking either of those options, we set out to create something for Rails that’s automatic and helps bring out the signal from the noise, Stenographer.
Rather than relying on team memory or walking back through what could be a cryptic sprint’s worth of commit messages, Stenographer puts the onus on the developer to create a “human-readable” message when they push up their code. By simply adding [changelog Added emojis!] to your commit message, all your users will know that they can now enjoy full emoji support 😊.
For our first release, we focused on the technologies we use, Github and Slack. When a commit comes in with [changelog] it’s displayed and sends a message to a Slack channel. In the future, we hope to add support for a full range of other inputs and outputs. Go ahead and check it out and let us know what you think!