Here at Disqus, we use Trello as our project management tool of choice. Trello lets us plan out our projects in ways that make sense to both developers and product managers. Trello’s Power-Ups library let us integrate Trello with our other existing tools so that they can work seamlessly together.
Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re open-sourcing two internal tools our team uses to get more done with Trello.
Trello + Phabricator Integration
At Disqus, we use an open source tool called Phabricator for maintaining our codebases. While Trello supports power-ups for Github and Bitbucket, it doesn’t currently support a power-up for for keeping track of pull requests in Phabricator. Disqus is pleased to share a set of tools we’ve created to add this functionality to Trello: phab-trello and trello-phab.
Phab-trello is a webhook that you can add to your Phabricator installation. It monitors your team’s Phabricator activity and when it sees a PR with a Trello card linked within, it will add an attachment to the Trello card with relevant information about that PR.
Trello-phab is a Power-Up for Trello which is designed to read the attachment data generated from Phab-trello. It takes the attachments and generates rich information about the PR right in your Trello board.
We chose to create this integration as two separate tools in order to maintain a separation of concerns. This approach allows us to keep Phabricator (and our internal codebases) safely behind a firewall, while only exposing the information we need to our Trello boards.
Standup Helper: A Trello-Aware Standup Slackbot
At Disqus, teams meet for a daily standup to check-in and share the latest updates on projects and ask questions. Since we have a distributed team working across different time zones, having standup at a fixed time isn’t ideal. We experimented with a few standup bots for Slack but found that they didn’t provide enough context around what people were working on. Specifically, we wanted a better way to connect a developer’s update to the related Trello card(s).
To solve this problem, we created Standup Helper, an open source Slackbot. It integrates with Trello by linking people’s responses to the cards they’re assigned to.
Using this information, Standup Helper creates an interactive, asynchronous dashboard that our team can use to augment our standups with useful, persistent data such as:
- Active/inactive tasks, linked to their corresponding Trello cards
- Recently merged PRs and PRs in review (integrates with Phabricator)
- Upcoming Out of Offices (integrates with an OOO ICS feed)
- Custom notes, interrupt notifications, and sidebar requests