Kirkaldy

For use in our agency's internal messaging client, I created a team assistant for the test team. I named it David Kirkaldy, after the Scottish engineer who founded Kirkaldy's Testing and Experimenting Works in Southwark, London.

Kirkaldy has had two implementations. The first one I did was a Slack bot, using Ruby and the slack-ruby-bot library.

The second one is a Microsoft Teams bot (though it could be integrated with Slack as well), using Node.js and Microsoft's botbuilder library.

I hosted Kirkaldy #1 on Heroku, and Kirkaldy #2 initially on Microsoft Azure (which I would use again for future botbuilder bots) and eventually on AWS EC2.

Commands are easy to implement, especially in the Ruby library for Slack. In botbuilder with Node.js I needed to learn how to use Promises to deal with asynchronous JavaScript.

To date I've implemented the following commands:

Information retrieval

Explain concepts such as what an SPF record is
Show which Virtual Machines contain the OS or browser requested
Show step-by-step guide on how to remotely debug an iOS or Android device
List alt attribute guidelines
Show the combination of keys required to take a screenshot on a given device or OS
Retrieve Fiddler filter files and instructions on how to load them into Fiddler
Provide answers to commonly asked questions
Show the matrix of supported environments

Test assistance

Generate a placeholder image of a given height and given width (Implemented as a quick command, and as a multi-step conversation leading to a downloadable image.)
Provide testing prompts (pick randomly from a list of testing ideas) specific to a digital deliverable
For a given URI, parse the HTML and return results from automated checks general to HTML deliverables

Team management

Show upcoming holidays for team members, as well as upcoming Bank Holidays
For JIRA tasks currently in progress, return which developers and testers are working on what

Miscellaneous

Show any tube lines with delays or outages plus a summary of the fault
Responses to casual conversation markers
Calculate walking time and distance between any two locations