Building in the open: Making project statuses smart

The great thing about building Squadlytics is that we can use it to track our own projects. Last week we turned on our status bot, and I received my first notifications!

Automatic reminders

On Monday I received an email at lunchtime reminding me that I still had 3 weekly updates to take care of. We picked midday on purpose to give people the time to write their status report in the morning - no need to be overly spammy by sending notifications as soon as you wake up.

Automatic updates

Then on Tuesday, the bot downgraded two of my goals as I still forgot to provide an update for them. Of course, I can go back into the tool and fix that. But at least, the rest of my team would be aware that these goals might not be on track.

It's is a simple thing to do, but it helps a lot to avoid having false positives in the app.

There's more to come

These are just a couple examples of the things we'll do to make project statuses smart and easy to manage. We're quite open about what we're building so don't hesitate to check the other blog posts in this series.

You can sign up for the beta at https://squadlytics.com to get early access and regular updates on the project.