Incident Response Slack App

As we learn how to better use Slack we are experimenting with different ways of managing our response to incidents, aka emergencies. One experiment is that when an incident is discovered the existing #incident-response channel is used to send an alert to those on-call. We then immediately create a new channel for only the new incident's staffing and communications. While we rarely have overlapping incidents, having a dedicated channel does prevent the interleaving of messages about other incidents, too many tangents, and only those working the incident are disturbed by @channel or @here messages. When the incident is resolved the channel's messages can be copied into the beginnings of the post-mortem document, and then archived.

During the response, tasks emerge that need to be assigned and tracked. Slack itself is not good at this alone. There are many applications for task management that can be made accessible via Slack slash-commands. For incident response tasks, however, these general purpose applications were too focused on the user and not enough on the channel. When listing tasks we only want to see those for this incident. Their extra features also had a cognitive weight that I brisselled at. Overall, their fit for purpose was poor.

What was needed was a task manager with a scope limited to one channel. The task manager would be installed in the workspace, and so accessible to everyone, everywhere without configuration, but when in use was channel focused. The task manager needed to support these simple the use cases

• Adding tasks with a description, assignments, and a status.
• Updating a task’s description, assignments, or status. Only notify the channel when the changes are pertinent to all.
• Listing the tasks with optional criteria.

These use cases turned into the /ir slash-command

/ir description [ user … ] [ status ]
/ir task-id [ description [ user … ] [ status ]
/ir [ all | finished ] [ user … ] [ status … ]

If you are interested in the implementation then see github.com/andrewgilmartin/com.andrewgilmartin.incidentresponse