Hello Product Hunt,
In both small- and large-sized tech companies I have worked for, reserving a staging environment to test a feature has been unnecessarily challenging. You need to communicate with the whole team that you are going to deploy your branch to a specific staging environment.
Most of the time, developers simply send a message like 'Hey, I am going to deploy my branch to staging #2, is anyone else using it right now?' to a team channel in Slack. That works, but not everyone is checking their team messages all the time. Imagine you deployed your branch and testing a user story or investigating a bug, would you be keeping an eye on Slack as well?
Of course, some teams opt to use '@here' thus sending notifications to each member. In theory, this approach may work, but in the long term, it disturbs team productivity because each team member will need to stop what they are doing and check that message.
I built a Slack bot in my free time to solve this issue. The bot keeps track of who is using which staging environment. Users can interact with it either using the Slack app home tab or slash commands. It also sends notifications based on the team's notification configuration. It's a simple app but I belive it can be useful for many people out there!
I am super excited to get your feedback!
Halil
Super useful if you have shared resources within your company. It's called StagingApp but it's not limited to only that. Imagine managing a some parking slots with it.
Staging App
GitNoter
Staging App
Staging App