How to Use Slack for Web Development Workflows

When it comes to development operations (aka DevOps) today, teams are collaborating remotely.

In fact, recent studies highlight that this might be a more permanent setup for a majority of companies.

Even Stewart Butterfield, CEO of Slack, predicts that Slack’s future workforce will be 20-30% remote with the majority of employees appearing at work 1-2 days per week for face time with their teams.

As a part of this major shift, you’ll have to familiarize yourself with the many remote developer tools available that you can use to make your remote workflows easier. And if your web development team or client’s central communication platform is Slack, then you’ll be glad to know that it's one of the best remote tools out there.

So, without further ado, here are 5 ways Slack can help you streamline your software development workflows.

1. Bug Trackers

Developing a website doesn’t stop the moment it’s live. As newer software, integrations, and plugins are added to the equation, not to mention factoring in the kind of device(s) your users browse on, you’re bound to encounter bugs. Fortunately, various bug tracking software is there to automate the monitoring and tracking of bugs. Slack can be integrated with many of these programs, like Usersnap, Jira, and Bugsnag. They ensure that you and your co-developers are automatically notified, allowing everybody to deal with bugs as soon as they appear.

2. GitHub

As the leading development platform, GitHub has around 50 million web developers reliant on it to get their projects done. Slack’s GitHub integration allows you to get link previews for public repositories and create notifications with slash commands to stay on top of your workflow. Some activities you can subscribe to include but are not limited to: commit summaries, pull requests, and deployments.

3. HuBot

HuBot was developed by developers using CoffeeScript on Node.js — a runtime environment based on JavaScript. People often use a combination of different prototype board layout software to proof design ideas, utilizing circuit components on breadboards to ensure that the end product comes out functional. This helps reduce the guesswork that usually goes into designing. But with HuBot integration, you’ll have access to all the web development tools that you need. Whether you need to create/read files on the server or modify the data in your database, HuBot allows you to do all this and more on Slack.

4. Code Snippets

When developing code with the team, sometimes you have to share snippets of your progress, either for checking, reports, or coaching. Slack’s desktop app has a “create and share” snippet feature that you can use. To the left of the message box, click the lightning bolt icon to access the shortcuts menu. Under “Slack,” look for “Create code or text snippet” and click it. You can either type in your code or upload a file. Click “Create snippet” to post it on your chosen channel. There’s even a keyboard shortcut for it: Shift + Command (Mac) or Ctrl (Windows) + V.

5. The Ops Platform

Need one platform to rule them all for your dev team on Slack? The Ops Platform is a Slack-enabled serverless infrastructure designed for the needs of fast moving development teams who want to measure what the business cares about. The embedded Commands, Pipelines and Services provide all of the tools you need to easily integrate your GitOps and ChatOps workflows, so that you can workflow smarter, not harder.

In conclusion, Slack has a ton of neat features that make it the ideal collaboration platform for developers. Slack gives you the flexibility that you need to perform your tasks, whether that’s developer tool integration or sharing code.

Hungry for more? Here are another 14 developer Slack hacks for you to try.

Ria Jasper is a software developer and technical writer.