Alice helps you to run daily standup for your team.
How Alice works
Alice stays in a Hangout Chat's room and helps teams to run their daily standups in a simple concept:
- Everyday, Alice sends a reminder to each participant to enter their standup in their private chat. Alice then asks standup's questions and collects participant's answers.
- At standup time, Alice creates a summary and sends back to team's room.
Alice is highly configurable and offers a lot of customization. To set up a standup in a room, you need to add Standup Alice bot into the room
Add Standup Alice to a room
Please follow below step to add Alice to a room
- Open a room and select "Add people & bot" from a room context menu,
- Type "Standup Alice" in the search box, select "Standup Alice",
- Click on "Send", a standup with default settings is created. Alice also sends a link to change the standup settings.
The default settings includes
- Who participates: all members in the room will be in the standup
- What: default standup questions: What did you do yesterday?/What will you do today?/Are there any impediments in your way?
- When: every workday at 10h, Alice reminds at 9h and again at 9h30. You must set your timezone for Alice working properly.
You are freely to change your standup settings. Please watch below video for more details.
Important: by default, Alice couldn't initialize a private message to a member, each participant needs to initialize a message to Alice. It's simple, just send Alice a "hi"
Alice commands
Alice supports a few commands to help you easily manage your standups
Room commands
As a requirement of Hangouts Chat bot, you must mention @Standup Alice in order to send commands to Alice, for example @Standup Alice Status.
- /standup_on: set the current standup on in the room. It also creates a new standup in the room if there was no standup.
- /standup_pause: set the current standup pause state.
- /status: view current standup settings.
- /settings: an alias for Status command
- /feedback [message]: send a feedback to the bot developer
- /help: it's a help command ;)
Reminders and standup conversations
As mentioned earlier, everyone needs to send Alice a "hi" in private message first or they miss Alice's reminders. It's because Hangout Chats bot platform doesn't allow for bot to initialize a message to users.
Alice automatically sends reminders to participants with the first question as you defined in your standup settings. Participants can reply to Alice question and follow up questions to complete their standup. They can optionally select quick replies such as "Late", "Skip", "Day off", "Sick", "Vacation". For each quick reply, you can change your reply later
- Late: when you are busy or couldn't send your standup, you can chat with Alice and send your standup later even after your standup time. If you submit your standup after your standup time, it will deliver to the room immediately.
- Skip: Yes, you can skip a standup. Alice will report to the team that you skip it. However, you can change your mind and complete your standup just by sending Alice a message. You then need to follow the conversation to complete it.
- Day off: Just a day off, and Alice will remind you in the next day
- Vacation: Alice won't remind you until you tell Alice that your vacation is over. To do that, just send Alice a "hi" message when you're back from vacation, Alice will confirm without for your vacation status
- Sick: similar to "Vacation", you can send a "hi" message when you get back to work.
Standup Summary
Alice sends a summary of standups that she collects from all participants and send back to the room. You can change the summary format in the standup settings/Advanced tab. Alice can deliver summary in different ways
- Synchronous vs Asynchronous: By default, Alice will collect all standups and deliver at once (synchronous). You can change to asynchronous mode where Alice delivers standup as soon as she receives from a participant.
- Email delivery: Alice can deliver standup summaries to emails as well.
Here is an example of a standup summary.
