alternatives to standup

[willkg]

We're going to end Standup the project. Alternatives to Standup that we know about:

• Geekbot in Slack
• https://home.idonethis.com/

Are there other alternatives that you know of? Comment here.

[nokome]

Here's a few more:

• https://www.standup.report/
• https://jell.com/

I stumbled across this, because I was thinking about using Github issues (maybe one "Standups" issue per month) for daily stand ups in a remote team. Any thoughts?

[hotsphink]

@willkg I'm toying with the idea of creating a much simpler alternative, but only if I can do it in an hour or two. For the way I personally use standups, it would be enough to use my existing IRC bot and have it commit statuses to a github gist or repo. But the thing that makes me hesitate is the talk of authentication and things -- if there's any of that involved, I'm not doing it. But that made me wonder if I'd be getting into a dangerous area by making the status data all public and relatively easy to spoof -- do you have any advice on things to watch out for?

Also, I'm thinking of having it writable only via the irc bot, with read-only web access (via github, or rather rawgit.com). That's really not what standups is, as I understand it. In fact, another "alternative" would be a canned search for "standups:" on glob's logbot. So I'm wondering if there's a common usage scenario that involves writing via the web interface. (I still wouldn't do that, as I'm creating something dead simple and not a web app, but I might try to think about additional lame alternative mechanisms if there's a valuable use case that I'm missing.)

Thanks!

[jdm]

@hotsphink I'm with you on this one, with the caveat that I have used the web interface in the past for times when I want to record that I've been working on something but I'm not on IRC. I would be happy to give that feature up, however.

[willkg]

@hotsphink I think everything you're saying sounds plausible. One thing I used Standups for was weekly email digests. I wrote another program that would slurp a JSON API and send out email. That was helpful for weekly rollups.

I don't know how people were using standups or what their needs were, so I'm not sure what other things you'd need in a minimum viable product.

[a2sheppy]

For me, logging to the database using IRC is almost always how I do things (both because it is convenient and because it lets coworkers see my activity as well, in something like real time). That plus some method for generating reports showing activity for a given period would be all I would "need". Anything else is bonus.

[jdm]

I put together https://github.com/servo/standups and servo/crowbot@572f398 for use by the Servo team. I'm happy to integrate changes that anybody else wants, but I would encourage people to run an instance of their own where they can manage the data it contains.

[hotsphink]

And I implemented my gross hack using github as a backing store (and PRs if you want to edit.) Currently "live" (I haven't told anyone about it) in #jsapi; use by saying "confession: I'm doing stuff". ('confession' is an IRC bot.) Quite a bit of lag to see updates on the web UI, though; seems like githubusercontent doesn't serve updates immediately (via HTTPS; seems fast via git.)

[openjck]

FWIW, I wanted to mention that I Done This costs $5/mo. It isn't super clear before you sign up.

[openjck]

Does anyone know if Mozilla has an enterprise account with I Done This? Our logo is at the bottom of this page.

[kimberlythegeek]

Hi, all. We've been throwing ideas around in the test engineering team about alternatives, whether pre-existing or something that we build.

Obviously it's important to have as little upkeep as possible, or else we'd likely end up back in this same boat.

I came across getstream.io, an activity stream API (and I'm sure there are more). My thoughts are that we could build a simple front-end and integrate the API into irc.

A few people have shown interest in having a hack session in Orlando to see what we can come up with, and I'm working on getting that set up.

Would any of you be interested in attending? Any thoughts/opinions about this approach?

@willkg @openjck @hotsphink @jdm @a2sheppy @nokome

[a2sheppy]

@kimberlythegeek I'd be interested.

The MDN team has apparently settled on Status Hero (https://statushero.com/). It's not a 1:1 replacement for standu.ps but it seems to be making most of the team happy. I still miss the IRC bot. I may have to write one for Status Hero. Shouldn't be too hard.

[kimberlythegeek]

@a2sheppy That looks promising. I agree about the IRC bot

[hotsphink]

#jsapi has for now settled on the thing I hacked together. bbouvier and I have cleaned it up, moved to github-pages instead of rawgit, and made it generally functional. You can take a look at an example page at https://mrgiggles.github.io/histoire/?user=sfink and click the About button to see a description. It includes an IRC bot interface.

I'm not wed to it, and if getstream.io has advantages, I'd be interested in taking a look. But we're sort of at the "gee, it seems to work well enough so far" stage, so inertia is going to keep us on the confession bot for now.

Feel free to /msg <bot> !invite #yourchannel to try it out for yourself. is any or all of 'confession', 'standups-', or 'mrgiggles', though probably not the latter since you have to use the syntax "mrgiggles: note " instead of just "confession: " as with the other two. (They're all running out of the same process, they're just different interfaces to the same thing.)

[hotsphink]

It looks like statushero has a slack bot and github integration, which would be nice. (#jsapi doesn't really need the slack bot, but could definitely use github, bugzilla, and phabricator integration.)

[openjck]

One low-tech solution is to use Google Docs. Add one heading for each day and a number of bullet points below each heading. To support teams, just make it a shared document. It obviously doesn't do everything Standup did, but it's free, easy, and portable.