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How MaestroDev Delivers Enterprise-Grade DevOps Orchestration Tools With Flowdock

November 15th, 2012

Mikael Roos

Brett Porter

This is a guest blog post written by Brett Porter, CTO of MaestroDev, who develop DevOps orchestration tools. In this article, Brett lays out how they’ve used Flowdock as a main communication tool with distributed teams and integrated Flowdock directly into their own products.

MaestroDev is a proud Flowdock customer. Since we began using it early in the year, we have greatly improved the internal visibility of development progress, and streamlined our methods of communication – reducing the number of redundant calls and emails.

The MaestroDev product development team is globally distributed, covering 4 different timezones. Our Flowdock flow is active 24 hours a day with development information and tagged updates for each other. Whether they work face to face, or remotely, Flowdock puts all of our team members on an equal footing, catching up on important discussions as they start their day, and leaving notes about progress for team members whom they may not otherwise be able to meet with immediately.

About Maestro

We have developed Maestro, our enterprise-grade DevOps Orchestration engine, to help enable all members of a software delivery team to be more efficient and collaborative. Maestro introduces Compositions, a reusable definition of a sequence of tools, processes and infrastructure that can be automated and interacted with. Compositions encapsulate best practices and encourage consistency across projects, reducing ramp up time and silos of expertise about infrastructure. Maestro is built to take advantage of modern public and private cloud technology to dynamically scale build, test and deployment infrastructure. This reduces friction between development, QA and operations team members and reduces the wait time for necessary infrastructure. Finally, Compositions and their execution output provide a single source of truth and history about a variety of systems, where team members can keep up to date, participate in decision points, and gather feedback from integrated tools to determine future improvements.

Integrating Flowdock and Maestro for Delivery Visibility

As you can see, Flowdock complements Maestro as a dedicated information flow for communication, notifications and actions. For this reason, we have developed Flowdock integration for Maestro and incorporated it into our delivery workflows.

You can read more about the Maestro Flowdock integration in the Maestro Documentation Guides, and at the plugin’s GitHub project page.

Maestro has integration for a number of different tools available, and at MaestroDev some that we use are:

  • JIRA: issue tracking and sprint planning
  • GitHub: source control
  • Jenkins: continuous integration and automated builds
  • Apache Archiva: build artifact management
  • Vagrant and VirtualBox: virtual machine for testing and delivery
  • Puppet: infrastructure configuration management

With these tools orchestrated by Maestro and information streaming to Flowdock, we’re able to track a change from a JIRA ticket and a commit, through its deployment on a preview instance, automated functional tests and a complete candidate virtual machine image for distribution.

Our primary automated workflow looks like this:

  • A commit at GitHub triggers a notification to Flowdock, and triggers a Composition to start the rest of the process
  • Maestro ensures a suitable Jenkins job is executed to build the project and publish to the artifact repository.
  • Flowdock is notified in the event of success (showing the published RPM version and build number) or failure (showing the full output and error that occurred)
  • If it was successful, Maestro concurrently starts Compositions to update the preview instance, and run functional tests
  • For the preview instance, we update the RPM version in the Puppet manifest, and trigger a Puppet agent run on the host. Puppet reports back to Flowdock when it is complete, and we know the preview instance is updated with the change
  • For functional tests, a virtual machine is started with Vagrant, provisioned with Puppet, and then tests are run via Jenkins using Cucumber and Capybara. If any fail, a notification is sent to the main Flow.
  • If the functional tests are successful, then a new virtual machine is produced and a notification sent to the main Flow.

Of course, we have many other such Compositions for sequences including releases, building and deploying Puppet modules, publishing promoted VMs to Amazon S3, and so on – all similarly integrated with Flowdock.

If you’re interested in trying Maestro out for yourself, contact us and we’ll set you up with an evaluation system and several similar pre-configured examples.

Flowdock has become the first thing I check in the morning, and one of the most useful tools I turn to throughout the day to find out what is happening, discuss a solution with a colleague, or just share a link to something fun and interesting. Our thanks go to the Flowdock team for a great product!

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Flowdock As Onboarding Tool

August 23rd, 2012

Mikael Roos

Krista Kauppinen

This is a guest blog post written by Krista Kauppinen who recently started as Head of Online Marketing at Holvi, a customer of ours. She explains how Flowdock has helped her get started at her new job.

I recently started as the second nontechnical employee at Holvi, an online banking service startup that was founded in 2011. Our company is growing, but we still have everyone on the same Flowdock flow. This has been an unexpected blessing for me.

I have a business degree and I work on marketing and customer acquisition. I don’t always understand the discussions our developers have on the flow, but I’m able to see what they’re talking about and it’s in writing (so I can google unfamiliar terms!). Being able to easily get a technical perspective on customer questions and feedback by forwarding emails to Flowdock means I’ve been able to do customer support from almost day 1.

Flowdock has also been great for better understanding the pace of technical development and the relative difficulty of implementing new features and bug fixes. The team inbox that brings in data from Twitter, Zendesk and reports from our product, gives a good overall view of where we are in terms of progress.

Our team uses tagging actively, so I’ve been able to search tags like #todo, #blog or #marketing to see what’s previously been discussed on different topics. Not having to pop into the other room to ask questions and interrupt people’s workflow or send an email to whoever I suspect might know about issue X has made joining the team a lot smoother.

An added bonus of using Flowdock is seeing when my co-workers are online, as startup founders and developers often work odd hours. This has been useful for understanding their work patterns better. We have our security advisor as part of the flow, giving his point of view on what we discuss. Security is a very important aspect of building a banking product, and without Flowdock, getting information about this would be a lot more time consuming.

We also use Flowdock to share various types of benchmarking data, relevant articles, ideas we have, customer development insights and even jokes. This has helped me get to the know the company and my coworkers faster than at many previous jobs and with less effort from the others to get my caught up.

Thank you Flowdock!

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UserVoice Integration

July 26th, 2012

Antti Pitkänen

UserVoice is a feedback and help desk product that makes responding to customer needs fast and effortless. We at Flowdock have previously integrated with UserVoice only by plain email notifications. Seeing that UserVoice has recently rolled out its neat Service Hooks, we just couldn’t resist making the integration even better.

With the new integration you will be notified of all that is happening in your UserVoice community, and the entire team can participate in responding to the feedback. Now that the feedback is sent directly to Flowdock, your email inbox no longer gets overflowed with notifications. In addition, the Service Hook configuration makes it easy to define which notifications you want to see in your team inbox.

Setting up the integration

To get started, visit our UserVoice help page and follow the short list of instructions. You should be integrated and receiving notifications from UserVoice in no time.

Here is an example notification in the team inbox:

P.S.

In a deal we struck with the awesome UserVoice folks, the ten first Flowdock teams to sign up to UserVoice by using the code hiflowdockers will receive 25 % off for a year of UserVoice.

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Flowdock Makes Xobni More Productive

May 31st, 2012

Mikael Roos

Xobni, one of the earlier Y Combinator funded startups (YC 06), is a Flowdock customer. They make your inbox and address book smarter by making it easy to search and discover all your contacts – even those who aren’t in your address book. Xobni’s director of marketing, Britton Montalvo paints a picture:

What if you had a magic address book that automatically identified the name and contact information for everyone you had ever communicated with? Xobni brings you that magic with our mobile and desktop solutions that automatically create rich profiles for all your contacts, including photos, complete contact info, communication history and updates from Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Xobni’s Smartr Contacts is available for iPhone (video & download) and Android (video & download). Both apps have been named “The Best Address Book Apps” by Lifehacker. You can even get it on BlackBerry. Smartr Inbox is available for Gmail and they have Xobni for Outlook.

Flowdock at Xobni

So, how does Flowdock fit into this? Xobni has been using Flowdock now for a few months. Having previously used an array of messaging clients including Skype, GTalk, Yahoo! Messenger etc, the Xobni team has seen a massive shift in communications moving to Flowdock:

Now 80% of our communications reside in Flowdock. Flowdock has also increased the Xobni Server Engineering team’s productivity tremendously with its deep integrations.

The Xobni team uses JIRA for defect tracking, Opsview for monitoring, Git for version control and also QuickBuild and Capistrano as deployment tools.

Flowdock manages to keep everyone on the same page, and working efficiently:

We are distributed across San Francisco, Montreal, Iowa and India and using Flowdock has enabled us to stay better connected with one another and work much more efficiently. At any time, anyone in the team can instantly get up to speed on what is happening in our network, so they can jump in to help resolve any issue or identify potential areas for optimization. With Flowdock, we are able to easily process and manage more than 5 billion messages for our users per month.

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Get To Know A Cool Flowdock Customer – Grand Cru Games

April 24th, 2012

Mikael Roos

Meet Grand Cru, founded in 2011 by six Finnish game industry veterans, they are a Helsinki based team of game creators. They say they have one direction: to revolutionize mobile and social gaming.

In their quest they have found Flowdock to be an essential tool. Creative director Harri Granholm says that with Flowdock, “we can work tightly together, but at the same time everyone can concentrate on their tasks without any unnecessary interruptions”.

The Cru’s new upcoming game, the Supernauts lets you create your superhero alter ego online. As a social game, the game is naturally best when played together, so it supports real-time multiplayer on a massive scale.

The Cru team is made up of mobile gaming and virtual world veterans combined with fresh design and other talent. That makes Flowdock a great fit:

We have noticed that Flowdock works well for the Cru as it has similarities with IRC which is a familiar tool for many of us. Many features, such as embedding images in a conversation and the integration with Pivotal Tracker, are essential to our work. In addition, our graphic designers are constantly sharing the material they are working on through Flowdock.

The Cru is also hiring.

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Track Your Brand With Flowdock

January 11th, 2012

Mikael Roos

Flowdock is an excellent tool for following your brand on the web with your team. Here’s a quick guide to cover the major steps to get your team in touch with your brand.

1. React To Tweets as a Team

First and foremost, you should track whenever someone mentions your brand on Twitter. We use it for example to detect if someone is asking something about us, even when they’re not directly reaching out to us.

Tweet

This way we can reply quickly, or have an internal chat about the topic.

Secondly, you can follow the Twitter account of your own brand, just to keep up-to-date about when someone from your team has Tweeted something.

Team Inbox Twitter Settings

To set these up, head on to Team Inbox settings, type in your brand, and click to follow the keyword, type it again, and click to follow the user. You can even filter out any replies and retweets if you like.

2. Subscribe to Google Alerts

Another great way to stay updated about what people are writing about your brand on the web, is using Google Alerts with Flowdock.

To set Google Alerts up with your Flowdock flow, follow these instructions:

  1. Get the email address of your flow (you can find it in Team Inbox settings)
  2. Go to google.com/alerts
  3. IMPORTANT STEP: If you’ve logged in to google, log out! Google lets you choose a custom e-mail address for the alerts only if you’re not logged in
  4. Fill in the form: It’s best to start with “All results” and then change it if you’re getting too many results. Google Alerts Form
  5. Click Submit
  6. A confirmation e-mail should pop up in Team Inbox. Verify the email address by clicking the link in the message. Google Alerts Confirm

You’re all set and receiving Google Alert notifications. Now you won’t miss what the public is saying about your product or service.

3. Feedback Should Flow To Your Flow

Feedback is super important for any endeavor. Flowdock is a great place to funnel into all feedback. There are 3 great ways to channel feedback to Flowdock.

  1. Automatically forward your feedback emails
    If you have a feedback email address (like feedback@yourcompany.com), make sure that all e-mail sent to it, gets also sent to your Flowdock flow. How this can be done depends on your email service provider. If you’re using Google Apps, check out these instructions (section “To add new members”).
  2. Feedback forms
    We use a simple feedback form right within the app from which the feedback is sent to our Flowdock flow. To make this happen, it’s often easiest to use any e-mail capable feedback form to send the feedback to your flow. You can pre-tag the feedback either by using a #hashtag in the subject line or by modifying the e-mail address of the flow in the following way: let’s say your Flowdock subdomain is “company”, the name of your flow is “main” and you want feedback to get tagged with the #feedback tag, you can use the e-mail address main+feedback@company.flowdock.com. If you want to code something yourself, or e-mail isn’t a choice, check out the API.
  3. Feedback services (UserVoice, Get Satisfaction etc)
    If you’re using a feedback service of some sort, it’s usually easiest to add a user to that service using the email address of the Flowdock flow as the e-mail address of the account. Then just configure the notification settings of the service to suit your needs. We use this approach to work with our own Uservoice page.

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Handle feedback with Flowdock

March 3rd, 2010

Mikael Roos

We try to be as responsive and communicative as possible towards our users because they are our future customers (fingers crossed), and they provide incredibly valuable customer feedback.

We try to give our customers enough ways to give us feedback, so they don’t have to sweat it. They can use a feedback form inside Flowdock flows, use our Uservoice page or send us email directly to team@flowdock.com. Some users choose to use Twitter for feedback and they catch our attention by mentioning @flowdock. All this means we need to track different mediums. Luckily enough, Flowdock gives us everything we need, in real time.

Emails and Twitter

Handle feedback from different mediums

In this example from the Tour, you can see how we handle feedback from emails and tweets.

  • Responsiveness comes easily when the whole team can respond to the feedback
  • All feedback form emails have the tag #feedback in their subject, so they get correctly tagged
  • We have forwarded all the emails to team@flowdock.com to our development flow as well, so it’s easy to answer to them and track them in Influx
  • Live, face-to-face feedback we just type into the chat and tag it with the same #feedback tag

With these practices, all the feedback is easily accessible when we need it.

Uservoice

Uservoice changes in Influx

Uservoice is a great way of sourcing and managing ideas and suggestions from the user community. The team gets notified about all changes in Uservoice as well. It’s great to talk over new feature requests inside our flow right away when they’re suggested. Then we tag them further and they become part of our backlog. That is agile.

7 days to Flowdock public beta on March 10th!

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