When our company was acquired we needed a way to keep our team and remote teams updated on what we was done. Some members were often travelling or in different time zones. We needed a way to see everything that was done each day all in one place, especially as the teams worked on more complex projects. Everyone was using different methods to do this: standups, written reports, emails and meetings. Nothing stuck. “!done reports” introduce a simple IRC command: !done. Team members say !done and what they just did. These !dones are put into a daily report. !done becomes a part of everyday at work, not a strained task that’s easily forgotten. Many development teams already use IRC, Skype and other systems to communicate. !done is an addition to existing systems, is open source and easily modified. It is built off of ZenIRC bot and bundled into Loqi, the friendly IRC bot lurking in the #pdxtech channel on freenode. This presentation will show you how a simple bot solved a lot of problems for a lot of distributed people.

1. Amber Case
@caseorganic
Aaron Parecki
@aaronpk
acase@esri.com
Director, Esri PDX
aparecki@esri.com
CTO, Esri PDX
!done - Hacking IRC Bots for Distributed Teams
Open Source Bridge 2013!

3. Changes
• Team dynamics change after 6 people
• Scrum lasted about 4-5 days
• Daily standups = cumbersome
• Needed a way to quickly share status

5. > !done

6. First system
11/2012 - built quick
system to let us use
existing communication
channel: IRC
Team used IRC for years for group chat, also for
server log messages to get a pulse on the system

7. How it works
• During the day, the IRC bot asks you what
you’ve done
• You say !done what you did
• At the end of the day, everyone gets an email
with what everyone has done
> !done squashed some bugs

8. At the end of the
day, everyone gets
an email with what
everyone has !done
> !done
squashed some
bugs
Daily Email!

10. !done commands
> !done pushed to production
> !todo send out notification emails
> !hero caseorganic for bringing
Legos!
> !blocking loud noises from
construction work

11. And…

12. > !meme

13. > !meme to production | and beyond!

16. Adoption
Someone sees our
channel & asks
“what is that?”

17. Scale!
Lots of people want to use it!
!donereports was built as a hack, we
needed this quickly
It was a database, IRC bot and a daily
email, no other interface!

18. Aaron was the bottleneck:
had to add users manually
mysql> INSERT INTO users
(username, email, nicks) VALUES
('aaronpk’,'aparecki@esri.com',
'aaronpk');

21. All Groups

24. Limechat

25. Limechat

26. Email report!

27. Documentation?
No documentation!
Invariably, someone else in
the channel will explain how
it works!

28. Usage Suggestion
• If a group doesn’t use one of the features
(such as !hero) then that email contains a tip
at the bottom with a suggestion!

29. Building IRC Bots
Use ZenIRC Bot!
• Great framework for building bots!
• github.com/zenirc
Benefits
• Modular – service oriented
• Can write in any language and run under the
same bot
• Uses Redis PubSub to pass message between the
different frameworks

30. Bot Architecture

31. Beta for OSBridge Attendees!
Want to try it out? Sign up at donereports.com
and we’ll let you in!

32. github.com/donereports/Done-Reports-IRC

33. > !done presented at OSBridge!
Amber Case
@caseorganic
Aaron Parecki
@aaronpk
acase@esri.com
Director, Esri PDX
aparecki@esri.com
CTO, Esri PDX
Tweet suggestions to @donereports!
donereports.com