Oskar - the Slack satisfaction coach

Note: Oskar is currently not being actively maintained and has a number of issues, so may not be suitable for use in production 🙂

Description

Oskar is a Slackbot that tracks satisfaction of your team members. Every day it asks people how they're doing. This metric is stored in a database and tracked over time, allowing the team to understand which members are struggling or doing extremely well.

Everyone on your team can ask Oskar for another team member's or the entire team's current status. It is not meant to be a way of comparing people but to surface issues, unblock each other and eliminate isolation (especially in remote teams).

Please keep in mind that Oskar isn't a full-time project of ours. We do use him internally, so there's definitely an incentive for us to fix bugs fast, but since we are a frontend-focused team, rather than an engineering one, it can sometimes take a little while for us to find the time and resources to get bugs fixed up. Thanks for understanding!

Installing him on Heroku

You can deploy your own copy to Heroku with one click using this button:

See the Heroku documentation for more info about changing the configuration variables after deployment.

Using the bot

Oskar automatically asks you two times a day how you're doing. You can reply to him with a number between 1 to 5, and he will then ask you for feedback to know what's the trigger for your current low or high.

You can send the following commands directly as a chat message to Oskar:

• How is @member? - Tells you how a specific team member is doing
• How is @channel? - Returns the current status for the whole group

All data is collected in a database and made visible via the dashboard, which can be found at the URL: http://your-oskar-url.com. If you're hosting on Heroku, this URL is going to be something like http://myherokuappname.herokuapp.com.

Find instructions on how to set a username/password for your team metrics, below.

The App

Tech stack

• Oskar is build on node.js with express.js.
• It is written in CoffeeScript (such as the node slack client it uses)
• It uses a MongoDB database to store team member feedback
• It (usually, but not only) runs on Heroku

Configuring Oskar

Basic Setup

There are two ways of configuring Oskar.

1. Using local configuration: You copy the contents of the file config/default.json and create a new file config/local.json with your environment's variables.

2. Using Heroku env variables: Use .env.sample to set up your Heroku env variables, either setting them via the command line (as described here) or directly from the Heroku panel.

Here's the config variables you need to define:

• mongo.url (or MONGOLAB_URI for Heroku) defines the url to your MongoDB database (to create a mongoDB on Heroku, go to https://elements.heroku.com/addons/mongolab). This will be automatically generated if you create a MongoLab database as described below ("Setting up Oskar on Heroku") in step 4.
• slack.token (or SLACK_TOKEN for Heroku) is the token of your team's Slackbot (you can create a new Slackbot here: https://yourteam.slack.com/services/new/bot)

Post all feedback messages to a group or channel

If you want to broadcast all user feedback to a channel instead of sending every status message to each user on your team via direct message, you can set the slack.channelId (or CHANNEL_ID for Heroku) config variable.

This defines the channel or group where Oskar will broadcast all user messages. On Heroku, don't add quotes around the parameter, just the channel ID: CXXXXXX.

You can find out our your Slack channel IDs here.

Additionally you can disable specific channels or users:

Set slack.disabledUsers (or DISABLED_USERS for Heroku) to disable specific users if you want certain people on your team to not receive any Oskar messages at all. Go here to find out your user IDs. When using Heroku, be sure to put the list IDs into quotes like this: "UXXXXXX", "UYYYYYY"

Set slack.disabledChannels (or DISABLED_CHANNELS for Heroku) to disable channels that Oskar is part of (Go here to find out your channel IDs). When using Heroku, be sure to put the user IDs into quotes like this: "CXXXXXX", "CYYYYYY".

Configure dashboard password protection

By default your dashboard is protected via a simple HTTP auth mechanism. (we'll try to improve this in the future)

• auth.username and auth.password (or AUTH_USERNAME and AUTH_PASSWORD for Heroku) define your login data for the dashboard. Make sure to share those with your team.

Development and Contributing

Local environment quickstart

###Prerequisites:

• Node.js:
• Heroku Toolbelt so that we can use Heroku Local
• MongoDB: Full instructions are here:

You might find this helpful, if you're setting up MongoDB for the first time:

# Update the homebrew package database
$ brew update
$ brew install mongodb
# Create a data folder to store MongoDB databases, then set up the permissions for it
$ sudo mkdir -p /data/db
$ sudo chown $USER /data/db

###Run the app

# will start MongoDB on port 27017 and initialise the database
$ mongod

# Install the dependencies
$ npm install

# Start the app using Heroku Local
$ heroku local

You can then view the app at http://localhost:5000

Unit tests

Oskar is being tested with Mocha and should.js For the mongo tests to pass, you'll have to run a mongo database under mongodb://localhost:27017.

Run the unit tests for all modules:

$ npm test

To run only a single unit test call the test file explicitly, such as npm test test/inputHelper.coffee