✓ Powerful Automations — Part ❶ — Daily Report

between (JIRA, Github, Slack, G-Calendar) and how it effects you development process

During my work as a Squad leader and a Scrum master I’v learned many powerful tips and tricks and how to improve our development process using automations and platform interrogations, follow this series to learn what I’v done and how you can do it yourself.

1. ⏰🗒👤 Automated daily report

One of the biggest problems I faced is daily’s, specifically knowing whats being worked on every day and making sure the committed work is being done without blockers and on schedule.

The traditional way is scheduling a meetings not more than 15 min (obviously it take more than that) to circle trough the squad members and ask what they did yesterday and what they are going to work on today. The problem is that this conversation is not being documented and in retrospective stating why a feature/bug has been pushed to next sprint might be vague and not precise.

What are the benefits

1. Documented daily work
2. Know the status of tickets worked on today “Done/Blocked/In Progress”
3. Allows more accurate retrospective report
4. Its automated! leaving more time to actually finish your tasks. this approche might not repalce meetings completly but its a step.

JIRA is a powerful tool and we should utilize whats been given to us to serve us intelligently, specifically automations.

How does it work?

1. A scheduled automation in JIRA runs every day at 5pm, gathering all the issues the team members of squad in that day.
2. A web hook between JIRA and Slack sends the information from JIRA to a dedicated channel of your choosing.

Using this automation you will have full knowledge about whats being worked on today, a true source of truth, whats the agenda, what ticket has been done or started progress and many more bits of information aiming at successfully finishing the sprint with the committed tasks.

How can you do it?

1. Make sure you have the proper JIRA permissions to add automations
2. In JIRA go to Settings->Projects->Find you project and click the 3 dots on the right->Project Settings->Automations on the left
3. Click on “Create Rule” (top right corner) and select “Scheduled” trigger
4. set the “Cron expression” to “0 0 15 ? * SUN-FRI” which means: Run every Sunday — Friday at 2pm (my timezone is +3 so i will get it at 6pm)
5. Add the “Lookup issues” step, use the queary “issuekey IN updatedBy(<Name of jira user>, “0d”)”
6. Click Save and add a new step called “Send Slack message” and create a Web hook following the instructions
7. Then add this text to parse the results to make sense

👤 <Member Name> Worked on:

{{#lookupIssues}}
~ 📣 [{{status.name}}] — {{summary}} -> {{URL}}
{{/}}

to add more members to the report continue the rule again from step 5, the end result will look like this

Click Save and publish rule, Thats it!

This looks like a lot of work especially since this must be done for each user BUT once it's done no extra works is necessary.

Part ❷ — Automated Smart Calendar For Teams