6 Workflow Builder templates for software engineers

There’s an old saying in technology circles that the best programmers are lazy. It’s actually quite the compliment. A great developer will automate repetitive processes so that they can focus their energy on solving more complex problems.

Workflow Builder is a tool for automating routine functions right in Slack (available on all paid plans). We talked to engineering teams at Slack and at some of our largest customers to learn how software developers are using Workflow Builder, from automating standups to faster deploy alerts. Here are half a dozen workflow templates you can use to make engineering work, well, less work.

1. Conduct daily standups or weekly reflections

Status update meetings are useful for project management, but can be disruptive to individuals. Instead of breaking your team’s flow to gather for a standup, have everyone post updates in Slack. Or, you may prefer to end each week with a recap on Fridays. Both are easy to set up in Workflow Builder.

Create daily or weekly reminders that fire into your team’s channel, and either ask everyone to post their replies as a thread to that message, or create a quick form to focus your team’s answers on a few key questions and ratings.

Try our status update template.

2. Build a friction-free feedback form

Bright ideas can come from any part of your company—not just your developers—so it’s important you make it as easy as possible to collect them.

Use Workflow Builder to create a form for any channel where teammates organically discuss ideas or potential bugs. Keep your form simple, just a quick question or two. From there, you can automatically formalize the best ideas or showstopper problems into Jira tickets or Asana tasks.

Use this template to gather feature ideas, bug reports, shoutouts, etc.

3. Automate build alerts

If you have a channel set aside for periodic updates, you can use Workflow Builder to trigger automatic messages. At Slack, by simply clicking a button, our developers watching over #deploys launch an automated post when a code deployment is considered complete and error-free. Everyone committing code can see it and know instantly when their work is out to customers.

Use this template, without the form, to create posts on the fly with your pre-formatted message.

4. Gather votes from your team (say, for a hackathon)

One of our customers found a particularly clever way to use Workflow Builder: organizing an internal hackathon and collecting votes for winners using Slack.

The voting process starts with the hackathon organizer posting instructions in the developer channel, letting members know to use a specific emoji to start the voting workflow. Those who react with the emoji automatically receive a voting form through their Slack DM. Results are then downloaded as a CSV file to quickly tally up votes.

Hack this feedback template for your voting needs.

5. Launch a task with emoji

Workflows can be triggered in multiple ways and, like the previous example, you can use this feature to launch functions when someone marks a message with an emoji. When emoji are used to “claim” requests, you can automatically fire off a message thread stating who clicked the emoji, and then send the claimant a form to start to fulfill the request.

Stringing these together means you can build some pretty complex apps for your team in just a few minutes in Workflow Builder.

Give it a spin with this travel request workflow.

6. Use webhooks for apps that lack a Slack integration

We’ve heard from several software teams using cloud services to manage their work that they’ve chosen a vendor that doesn’t yet have an easy way to send updates into Slack. But those services often have webhooks and when they do, you can use Workflow Builder to manage incoming messages from your servers, systems and hosts. Use it to get alerts when a service goes down, or for updates when a status changes in another system.

Free up developers’ time so they can focus on high-value work with Workflow Builder
Software developers on any paid Slack plan can use Workflow Builder to help automate the work they do, especially those pesky repetitive tasks that take up a lot of time—time that could be spent building valuable new features for your customers. Check out our library of Workflow Builder examples for ideas you can quickly modify to fit your team’s exact needs.