Optimizing slack for your mobile team

I have been a very big proponent of slack for team communications. I used hipchat in my last company and pounced on slack when another team in new company is using it.

First step: Get everybody on board with free version

Initially it was hard sell I had to go to each developers desk and ask them to accept invite and install mac app. Even though they got invites, they just didn’t act on it. We are all burned by various tools, signups and invites, so I understand their intertia. But you got to convince your team by hook or crook. The testament to slack’s worthiness — with in 2–3 everybody is hooked. We are using this as our primary communication platform.

Second step: Get basic intergrations working — github, jira/pivotal tracker/trello

Once you add github intergration, everybody on the team notices that this slack thing is just more than lync chat. All the commits, pull requests, comments going into one central instead of emails will like OMG, its all here! Devs can go back and check on their history with ease.
Another easy win is to intergrate with your project management tool, jira integration is basic but still useful. If you use modern tools like troll/pivotal tracker. They have much better integrations, you can create, change change of the tasks right from your slack board.

Third step: Move team to a paid version

The big advantage with a paid version is not only that we get more integrations but an emotional one, now team is invested in this tool. You might have already observed email flow reducing, lync chats only for external teams.
Also searching infintely in history is more useful than you can first imagine. If you remember having a conversation about something, just search for it, don’t ask.

Now that you have a paid tool, time for some automation magic. Let the real magic come in!

These are the integrations that I use to monitor our app traffic.

• Runscope — To monitor API’s I use runscope and the handy integration helps to keep on top of failures.
• App store reviews -You need IFTTT for this, checkout this recipe — https://ifttt.com/recipes/265622-app-store-review. These feeds are updated couple of times each day and we can get customer reviews to our attention everyday without any effort
• Crashlytics — very helpful for new app releases and monitoring customer crashes
• Jenkins — https://github.com/jenkinsci/slack-plugin this will help you to see the status of your automation test runs

What other integrations or strategies you use?