☀️ 👯‍♀️ Build a praise slackbot

[gregv]

Slack Bot MVP Development

Project Overview

Develop a Slack bot that facilitates feedback, recognition, and tracking of team performance using commands, buttons, and reactions. The MVP will include features for sending and receiving praise, viewing history and stats, and displaying a public wall of praise.

• We already have a Slackbot that you'll be adding this feature into

• You can likely start from this Slack example and modify it to fit our needs

Core Features for MVP

1. Send and Receive Praise Messages
2. Customize Messages and Emojis
3. View Praise History and Stats
4. Public Wall of Praise

Task Distribution

• Engineer 1:

  • Set up the Slack app and bot.
  • Implement the /praise command and backend service.
  • Develop the settings interface for message customization.

• Engineer 2:

  • Create the web dashboard for viewing praise history and stats.
  • Implement the public wall of praise web page.
  • Integrate the backend service with the dashboard and public page.

Detailed Requirements

1. Send and Receive Praise Messages

Description: Allow users to send and receive praise messages within Slack.

• User Stories:
  • As a user, I want to send a praise message to a colleague using a Slack command.
  • As a user, I want to receive a praise message from a colleague.
• Acceptance Criteria:
  • Users can type /praise to send praise. Then you select who to send praise to with a UI.
  • The praised user receives a notification with the praise message.
• Implementation Steps:
  1. Set up a Slack app and bot user.
  2. Implement a Slack command /praise.
  3. Create a backend service to handle praise messages and store them in a database.

2. Customize Messages and Emojis

Description: Allow users to customize praise messages and emojis.

• User Stories:
  • As a user, I want to customize the message format and emojis used in praise messages.
• Acceptance Criteria:
  • Users can set their preferred message format and emojis via a simple interface.
• Implementation Steps:
  1. Develop a settings interface for users to customize their messages and emojis.
  2. Store user preferences in the database.
  3. Apply user preferences when sending praise messages.

3. View Praise History and Stats

Description: Allow users to view the history and stats of praise messages.

• User Stories:
  • As a user, I want to view my received praise messages and statistics.
  • As a manager, I want to view the praise history and stats of my team.
• Acceptance Criteria:
  • Users can access a web dashboard to view their praise history.
  • Managers can view team praise stats.
• Implementation Steps:
  1. Develop a web dashboard to display praise history and stats.
  2. Integrate the dashboard with the backend to fetch data.
  3. Implement role-based access control for managers.

4. Public Wall of Praise

Description: Display a public wall of praise on a web page.

• User Stories:
  • As a user, I want to see a public wall of praise showcasing all praise messages.
• Acceptance Criteria:
  • A web page displays a real-time feed of praise messages.
• Implementation Steps:
  1. Create a public web page.
  2. Integrate the page with the backend to fetch and display praise messages in real-time.

Additional Guidelines

• Security & Privacy:
  • Ensure compliance with Slack's security and data protection standards.
  • Implement user authentication and authorization.
• Performance & Scalability:
  • Use a scalable database to store messages and user data.
  • Optimize the backend for performance to handle multiple requests simultaneously.
• User Experience:
  • Design a simple and intuitive user interface.
  • Ensure the bot works seamlessly with Slack's native features and commands.

Tools and Technologies

• Backend: TypeScript is what the Slack uses - you'll be doing something very similar to this example
• Database: Instead of storing something directly from this service into a database, call our Python backend that uses Firestore. This is how we did it with the news-gen bot.
• Frontend: React for the web dashboard, see this frontend repo
• Deployment: We just use slack deploy to update our bot

[gregv]

Adding a note that @AndrewHUNGNguyen is working on this - in the early stages

[AndrewHUNGNguyen]

@gregv @Aseem70 has spoken with me about the slackbot project and he expressed his interest to helping me out with the slackbot on the frontend side. Added him as one of the assignees to this ticket

[gregv]

Exciting times!! @AndrewHUNGNguyen @Aseem70

[gregv]

Working like this

[gregv]

Removed the need to add parameters for /praise command, using just this slash command to open the UI is great - no need to have arguments

[AndrewHUNGNguyen]

@gregv I opened a PR at opportunity-hack/ohack-slack-bot#2 for you to review. When you have time, please check it out and let me know if any refactoring or code addition/modification needs to be made.

[AndrewHUNGNguyen]

@gregv Since OHack October Hackathon is coming soon, I have thought of some minor enhancement ideas to praise messages that get sent:

1. When a praise gets submitted to the receiver, the Slack Bot will contain an additional message to check out their praises on the praise dashboard at ohack.dev/praise. This is to ensure that the praises data get written about them get saved and displayed to the praise dashboard and to hopefully increase engagemet with the praise board
2. Provide a short sentence on how to write a praise. This is because while I did do a couple of video demos on how to use the praise bot, the new members will always be joining into slack and will not have easy access to the video demos. So when a new member joins way after the demo video has been uploaded and have a praise written about them, they will have easy access to information on how to submit a praise.

I anticipate that the two enhancement ideas are going to be easy fixes, as it will be simple as adding static text messages to the current praise message.

[gregv]

Love it @AndrewHUNGNguyen !! For 2/ we probably need to add this more obviously in the Onboarding too