Daily Scrum Supporter (DSS)

Overview
DSS(1)
DSS - Home
DSS - Report Modal
DSS - Holding daily scrum (1)
DSS - Holding daily scrum (2)
DSS - Setting Modal

Inspiration

In recent years, a great number of IT projects have employed agile methodologies. Most teams, if not all, would adopt scrum, the most popular one. Although team members assign a scrum master, make a sprint backlog, and set daily scrums, there is a question. 'Do you stick to the duration of daily scrum meetings?' The answer is probably 'no' in a lot of teams at least in Japan. Throughout our research, we found that there are three problems in terms of daily scrum: (1) daily scrum meeting is always drawn out because team members try to solve their problems in the meeting, (2) not every member grasps the overall progress, plan, and impediments due to the dull and sluggish meeting, (3) a team introduces a large number of tools and they are annoying so that each member desires intuitive and concise tools. To solve these problems and provide with a great support people who are assigned to agile project, we launched this project.

What it does

DSS focuses on managing daily scrums. There are three features :

Sending survey forms - DSS sends simple forms to team members. They can write down their progresses, plans, and troubles in this form.
Publishing reports - Once all team members have completed their surveys (or the set time comes,) the report including all members' forms is published. It would be used in a daily scrum meeting or for checking progress anytime. Memberes can check these reports from DSS' Home view.
Holding daily scrum meetings with keeping time - Once Scrum Master starts a meeting, DSS counts 15 minutes (by default, the duration is set to 15 minutes, but you can change it). The duration has passed, where upon the meeting is ended by DSS.

How we built it

Survey & Report - Send a message at set time
To implement these features, we created the custom endpoint as a custom HTTP route, which sends surveys and reports, and designed the architecture, which Google Cloud Scheduler hits this endpoint once a set time comes. As a result, DSS can deal with scheduled events. In addition, the endpoint calls Cloud Scheduler in order to update a schedule when a user sets time from the settings screen.

Daily Scrum Meeting - Once Scrum Master hits 'Start Daily Scrum' button, a meeting link is created and sent to team's channel.
We uses Slack's call API and ZOOM's JWT App in order to implement this feature. DSS makes the most of 'end meeting' feature of both Calls API and Zoom App. The meeting is about to end when the set duration is over, and this feature prevent a team from drawing out a meeting wastefully.

Challenges we ran into

We needed to design an architecture to send a message periodically because there were no timer trigger in Slack Events API.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Using Google Cloud Scheduler, we could cope with timed events with flexibility.

What we learned

We did not know that we can develop an application easily on Slack until we joined this Hackathon. We felt that APIs and Block kit provided by slack are really helpful in building apps. Also, we learned how to improve user experiences with Block kit and Slack's Home view and how to schedule events flexibly with Bolt.

What's next for Daily Scrum Supporter (DSS)?

We would like to...
(1) implement OAuth authentication between Zoom and DSS.
(2) integrate with other meeting tools, such as Webex and Teams.
Also,
(3) we would like Slack to add Call and Huddle meeting feature to Slack API.