Oh god. This shows a complete misunderstanding of what daily stand-ups are for. This is just a bot for daily status reports.

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.

I was thinking the same thing. Who is really going to read these updates? If I was forced to do this at a company, I'd probably automate responses with a bot of my own. I'd call it the schitt-bot.

That's exactly it. The stand-up meeting was created because typical status meetings were a waste of time. Much was said, but most people were bored out of their minds.

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.

Hey thanks for the critique. I agree that this is a status report, but I think (virtual) stand-up is also appropriate, because the questions are more or less what's asked of you at an in-person standup.

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 appreciate that you're trying. But this misunderstanding, which you are helping support, does substantial harm to teams.

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

Disclaimer: I've been working on a similar product (https://jell.com) We don't have a bot (we do support slash commands).

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!

Thanks! Jell looks great :-)

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 :-)

Nifty idea. Key question missing for my team: "Is any of your work blocked by someone else?"

Thanks for the feedback!

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 :-)

Agreed. Handling that communication would be interesting. "Hi, Bob said your commit had issues. See ticket #[12]"

The team updates seem odd with everyone's response clobbered together. I'd much rather see the answers grouped by user rather than question.

I had the opposite reaction -- I thought it was a nice bucketing of 'what did everyone work on yesterday' and 'what is everyone working on today'. If it was grouped by user, then the user could just type everything in to chat.

thanks for the feedback! I'd be curious to know if other people feel this way too. Maybe it can be an option :-)

I was thinking about that too.

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.

Small teams will do good with the current grouping. Larger teams will get complicated.

Feature idea: DM @Jack "What did @john @mike @gsharma say for their standup today?"

Large organization support will definitely need some work. I think the solution will be multiple standup channels for different teams inside the company.

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.

History/Back is broken. If I navigate to /faq and then use my back button, my url updates but the content doesn't. Most recent chrome stable on OSX.

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.

oops, you're right. thanks for the bug report :-)

thanks for the kind words!

I really like the overall branding / design of this tool. Nice work. Going to give it a shot.

Thanks! Let me know what you think :-)

$1 per user, per month? Ouch.

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.

Also, on this note, we're in a similar situation. We have ~250 people in our Slack, but would only want this for 3-4 of them (the full time staff).

Thanks for your interest! Please contact me at hi@standupjack.com to chat further.

My guess is that no one would really read these standup summaries.

I think that's highly dependent on your team. We've been using it heavily to help stay connected without nagging each other. It's also especially useful for remote workers :-)

Reminds of https://home.idonethis.com/ except Slackified!

(edit: typos)

haha, yep. It's quite similar. I Done This offers way more though. Standup Jack is just focused on running great standups :-)

Seems very similar to https://geekbot.io/

Oh cool, yes it looks like we are trying to solve the same issue :-). One difference I can spot right away is that Geekbot will post the status update immediately, while Jack will collect everyone's responses and post them at one time. It's hard to say which one is more effective. I'm definitely bookmarking this service, thanks for sharing :-)

geekbot also allows custom questions, multiple standups, and is free.

How does this compare to Howdy?

It looks like Howdy offers quite a bit more than just standups. But if we compare Standup Jack to their standup product, it looks like someone chooses when to start standup (the "run check in" command). Standup Jack is slightly more automated, where you pick a time that works well for you and Jack will message you each weekday at that time for an update.

I was hoping the mascot would be a bottle jack with googly eyes.

Haha, nice idea :-)

Can I ask Jack to talk to only 4 of 6 members of my team? I don't see a way to do that.

not yet! but i'm planning on adding admin options soon :-)