Bots

Our collaboration tool for Stride - Stand-bot.

Luis Ortiz

Dec 20, 2017 — 4 min read

Since the very beginning of SoftwareDevTools, we have been obsessed with the way remote and onsite teams collaborate. When we first launched PlanningWith.Cards as a Hangouts plugin we knew that chat platforms would be the cutting edge for high-performance teams and this thesis has not let us down.

We first started building on top of Hipchat when we headed to Connect Week Amsterdam a few years back and since then we have followed closely what Atlassian has built for chat platforms. But during the Atlassian Summit in San Jose, they revealed their vision of what a collaboration tool should be like when they released Stride to the public.

Stride has full support for mobile which has been a long requested delivery channel from the Atlassian community. It was good to hear that now we can connect with our teams on our mobile devices, Hipchat did offer an app but lacked the versatility of other competing platforms.

So, we are happy to announce that we just published the Stand-bot app for Stride in the Atlassian Marketplace. It has been an interesting journey to have our Stand-bot app live in the marketplace, thanks to the Stride team who have been launching new features since it was announced at Atlassian Summit and they have been proactive in getting us up to speed on the platform.

The battle between chat platforms.

Even though Hipchat was the first platform to be adopted in the development space, it was not the first. We have seen Skype and Yammer as the gatekeepers in the Enterprise space but it was Hipchat being adopted by Startups and development agencies, that catapulted it into the limelight. This has not come with its fair share of scaling problems that most platforms suffer, this caused Slack to raise between the cracks and has stayed as the leader in this space….for now ;)

Competition is great, it makes innovation sprout and the winner is the user. For the platform developers, it creates opportunities to build on top of these platforms and grow with them; you do have to be aware that there will be risks involved. Because the users are not yours, it is the platform that provides them and this will develop a dependency.

The rewards from these platforms have provided a strong incentive for developers to start creating apps in the Atlassian Marketplace or the Slack Directory, there are many unmet needs by these platforms for specific business processes that organizations have. We have seen how customer experience is a key part in the growth of these chat platforms because it provides a direct channel for communication that accelerates business decisions and creates better workflows inside an organization.

Stride’s goal is to create a complete communication solution for teams and organizations that want to create high-performance environments to deliver products/services that create the best customer experience for their clients.

Apps and integrations to increase collaboration.

It is the main reason the adoption of chat platforms have taken off. With so many integrations in different marketplaces and apps, a team can incorporate any platform to their daily routines such as team Standups, their customer support ticket platform or have direct access to their favorite project management application.

Our focus has been to enable remote and distributed teams to replicate Agile and Scrum ceremonies in a platform that allows them to be in different places but not losing any of the dynamics that they would have if they were in the same room. The result is a more efficient collaboration and a lot of time saved.

With our Stand-bot for Stride, you invite the bot to a room to create a Stand-up session with them and with some simple configuration you can get your team started to run asynchronous daily "stand-ups" updates from your teammates. Take a peek and let us know your thoughts.

It has been a great experience developing bots for chat platforms and we feel that we are just beginning to see the big potential for these apps to enable teams to become more connected plus allowing much smoother workflows for organizations large and small. Leveling the playing field for companies to compete on a global scale.

Trying to improve your #Agile practices? OR are you getting started with Agile? Are you in a remote team? Check out our products for Agile teams at SoftwareDevTools. We focus on making agile ceremonies more effective and easier to adopt for remote teams.

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