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Automating your daily standup with Ellipsis

Hunter Brooks

Automations in the Software Development Lifecycle

Did you know that Ellipsis can automate your daily standup?

Typical engineering teams will have a 20 minute daily standup. What percent of that time is spent resolving blockers? What percent of that time is spent by each developer explaining what they shipped yesterday?

I couldn't find any hard data to answer those questions, but from my personal experience, most teams spend more time than they would like to simply updating others. That's a poor use of time.

With Cron Workflows from Ellipsis, you can configure a workflow to run every day at 9am that summarizes all the recent code changes and posts them in Slack. This'll allow every engineer to show up to standup with a high-level understand of what their colleagues got done the previous day.

By default, standup reports look like this, but they're fully customizable:

Some teams post one message per developer, which contains all the code change that 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/exclude by type of code change (feature enhancement, refactor, documentation, etc.), logical size of change, and other traditional filters like author and repository.

Would you prefer to spend time in standup resolving blockers, or explaining what you shipped yesterday? With Ellipsis, it's reasonable to expect every engineer to arrive at your daily standup having skimmed what everyone else shipped yesterday.

You can also configure a similar Slack message to be sent whenever a developer merges a code change.

Ellipsis gives you smart, concise summaries of recently merged code.

We wrote a tutorial guide to help you get started. If you want to get a report that looks like this one, simply copy/paste these workflow instructions to use in 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 the 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.

Here's an example of how a report should look (in markdown):

```markdown
# 2️⃣ PR's merged
in myrepo in the past day
## API Session Management Enhancements (Feature, Refactor)
  • 2 pull requests: [#4475](https://github.com/ellipsis-dev/ellipsis/pull/4475), [#4476](https://github.com/ellipsis-dev/ellipsis/pull/4476)
  • Renamed the backend module from api_token to api_session, introducing a new public_access_token field for enhanced security and updated model and database row definitions.
  • Developed new frontend components such as ApiHomeTab, CreateApiKeyModal, and ApiTokensTable to manage API keys, including creation, listing, and deactivation.
  • Introduced API session management models (ApiSessionExternal, ApiSessionInternal, ApiSessionStatus) and a SQLModel representation (ApiSessionsRow) to support session operations.
  • Added API endpoints for creating, retrieving, and deleting API sessions, integrated with Slack notifications for better monitoring.
  • Extended PostgresClient with new methods to handle API sessions by access token and customer ID, improving database interaction efficiency.
```