Show HN: Standup Jack – A Slack Bot for Your Standups
standupjack.com
standupjack.com
The point of a daily stand-up meeting is to get everybody physically together, re-make human connections, quickly surface issues, get people talking, and get everybody charged up to go tackle the day as a team. Having a bot help you put the right cover sheet on your TPS report is in no way a daily stand-up meeting. One way you can tell is that it does not involve people actually standing together.
If people want to do daily status reports, that is totally fine by me, but please just call it that. Then when somebody asks me for help and I suggest they try a daily stand-up meeting, we don't have to spend 15 minutes while they un-learn the wrong thing.
The solution was to get everybody together to have a quick, real conversation about the upcoming day's work. And to keep it quick and dynamic, everybody had to literally stand up. Done right, this is great.
Merely renaming a lame status meeting to a stand-up meeting doesn't fix the problem. If people find so little value in doing an on-line stand-up that you need a machine to force them to do it, that's a sign that nobody sees it as worthwhile.
By having stand-up conducted by a bot, it's less invasive and easier for remote workers to give updates on their own time. But I do agree that nothing beats in-person meetings :-)
I agree that some people use those questions to help people get started doing stand-up meetings, but they are at best training wheels. They are only formally part of Scrum's "Daily Scrum" practice. The stand-up meeting comes instead from Extreme Programming. Those questions are not a bad place to start, but every well-meshed team I've seen has grown beyond them.
Saying that it's a stand-up meeting because it has the same questions as some people's stand-ups is missing the point. The whole reason stand-ups were created was to replace status updates. The goal is to get people together and focused on working as team. This tool enabling remote workers to do things on their own time is the exact opposite of that.
If people aren't standing up and talking with one another, it's not a stand-up meeting.
For those wondering what the hell I'm talking about, good places to read more:
http://guide.agilealliance.org/guide/daily.html
http://martinfowler.com/articles/itsNotJustStandingUp.html
And the earliest mention I know of it comes from Ward's original wiki: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?StandUpMeeting
One thing that sticks out to me (and a lot of the other standup bots) are that the screenshots/demo often only include the simple case of a user inputting a single answer to a question.
Does your bot handle multiple answers? Seems like that could be a differentiator for bots (and the reason why we've stuck with Slash commands).
Good Luck!
Yah, so the bot's questions are context aware, so answering "yes" does different things depending on the question asked.
I'll be going wayyy deeper on that soon and open sourcing some neat tools :-)
The last question is actually: "Is there anything blocking you". I originally cut it out of the picture for simplicity, but I'll add it back in :-)
My initial reaction was "that looks weird" (that they're grouped)... it reads like a status report.
However, the way something looks on a landing page isn't necessarily an indicator of what will work best in practice.
Real-life stand ups typically go around the circle once and people answer all the questions in one block because it reduces all the bridge statements like "that's it from me", "over to you, Dave", plus the cognitive burden of adjusting to different voices/accents over and over. Those reasons aren't such an issue with a textual re-cap.
I would do some hallway user testing (with printouts) before you go all the way to implementing a new feature.
Feature idea: DM @Jack "What did @john @mike @gsharma say for their standup today?"
I love your idea. It could also work for aggregation: "What did @john say this week?" or when there is multiple standup channels, querying for people who aren't in your team's standup.
Cool product. I'm going to see if my team would be interested in something like this. I like the design and branding as well. Kudos.
thanks for the kind words!
That's a lot to bite off honestly. We have 80+ people in our slack account, but i'd maybe wanna use this for ~20 of them. Doesn't seem to support that type of deal though.
(edit: typos)