Did you know that Ellipsis can automate your daily standup?
Typical engineering teams have a 20-minute daily standup. What percent of that time is spent resolving blockers? What percent is spent by each developer explaining what they shipped yesterday?
We couldn't find hard data to answer those questions, but from personal experience, most teams spend more time than they would like simply updating each other. That's a poor use of time.
With Cron Workflows from Ellipsis, you can configure a workflow that runs every day at 9am, summarizes all the recent code changes, and posts them in Slack. Every engineer shows up to standup with a high-level understanding of what their colleagues got done the previous day.
Some teams post one message per developer, containing all the code changes that developer merged yesterday. Other teams post a single message summarizing all of the changes. The reports are powered by Ellipsis' Analytics Engine. The instructions are in natural language, so you can include or exclude by type of code change (feature enhancement, refactor, documentation, etc.), logical size of change, and traditional filters like author and repository.
If you want a report like the one our team uses, copy these workflow instructions into your own workflow:
When this workflow runs, create a report of pull requests that have been merged in the past 1 day. Post the report to the #engineering Slack channel. The report will function as a standup update, so it should be detailed and specific because the audience is engineers who work in this codebase. The top line should use an emoji to depict how many PR's were merged. To create the report, identify logical groups of work in the recently merged code. Each group of work should be tied to a specific feature, enhancement, refactor, or improvement. Then, for each group, list up to 8 bullet points containing the most important changes. The first bullet point should list the pull requests associated with this group (including links to those PRs). If there are no recently merged pull requests, post a message explaining that.
You can also configure a similar Slack message to be sent whenever a developer merges a code change — smart, concise summaries of recently merged code, on whatever cadence fits your team.
Would you prefer to spend standup resolving blockers, or explaining what you shipped yesterday? We wrote a tutorial guide to help you get started — you can configure a workflow yourself in less than 2 minutes at app.ellipsis.dev.