How Round Robin works
Round Robin answers one question for your workspace: who is on call right now? Everything else on this site is a way of setting that up, or a way of getting hold of that person.
A rotation is a pool of people who take turns. At any moment some of them hold the duty (usually one person, more if you say so). A schedule decides when the duty moves on. Round Robin announces every handover in Slack, and keeps a @handle, a channel topic, or a channel’s membership pointing at whoever currently holds it.
That is the whole product. The rest is vocabulary.
The words this documentation uses
Section titled “The words this documentation uses”| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Rotation | A pool of people who take turns being on call, plus the settings that decide how. Create one. |
| Member | Somebody in the pool. Members take turns on duty. |
| Owner | Somebody who can edit the rotation. An owner is not automatically a member. |
| Duty / on duty | Holding the rotation right now. |
| Lane | One person on duty at a time. Most rotations have one lane; two lanes means two people on call at once, each dealt from a list of their own. Lanes. |
| Handover | The moment duty passes to the next person. |
| Next on duty | Who takes over at the next handover. |
| Schedule | The cadence that fires handovers: daily, weekly, working days, and so on. Set one up. |
| Coverage window | A stretch of hours in one time zone, with its own handover cadence. A window can be covered around the clock, or only at the hours you paint on its week, and outside those hours nobody is on duty from it. Coverage windows. |
| Cell | One lane inside one window: the place a person is on duty. A rotation with two lanes and two windows has four of them, each dealing from its own list. |
| Skipped | Passed over at a handover because you are away. Availability and out-of-office. |
| Code | A short name for a rotation (PAYMENTS, SUPPORT) used in Slack. Letters, numbers and hyphens; stored uppercase, matched case-insensitively. |
| Mention | Reaching the on-duty people by writing @Round Robin PAYMENTS in a channel. They get Ack/Pass buttons. The full flow. |
| On-duty group | A Slack user group like @oncall whose members Round Robin rewrites at every handover. Set one up. |
| Rotation card | The live summary of a rotation the bot posts in Slack. The Slack surface. |
| Notes | Free text on a rotation (a runbook link, a caveat) visible to anyone who can see it. |
The three modes
Section titled “The three modes”A rotation is always in exactly one of these, and the mode decides who is allowed to move the duty.
| Mode | Duty moves when | Set it by |
|---|---|---|
| Manual | Somebody presses Rotate. | Being the default, or picking the Manual schedule type. |
| Auto | The schedule fires. You can still rotate by hand in between. | Adding a schedule. |
| External | PagerDuty, OpsGenie or Jira Service Management says so. Round Robin mirrors their schedule and does not decide anything. | Linking an external schedule. |
What a rotation row tells you
Section titled “What a rotation row tells you”In the dashboard’s rotation list, every column is a fact about the rotation, and each row answers two questions: who is on call now, and who is on call next. Each of the two names people, and says underneath when their shift changes.
- On duty is who is reachable right now, whoever they are. Underneath, when that shift ends: until Friday at 18:00, or until handed over where nothing is scheduled to end it. On a rotation with more than one lane it names the lane while one person is on, and the soonest change while several are.
- Next shift is who takes the duty next, one face per seat on a rotation with more than one, and when it begins. Where nobody can be named yet it says which kind of not-yet it is: Not drawn yet on a rotation that picks at random, Not chosen yet on one handed over by a person, Not published where your partner sends only whoever is on now.
- Members is how many people are in the rotation, and how many channels it posts to.
- Properties is what the rotation is: a crown where you own it, a lock or a globe for who can see it, and a link where PagerDuty, OpsGenie or Jira Service Management manages it and it is read-only here.
You are named rather than badged. Wherever you hold the duty or take the next shift, the cell says You in place of your name, with your own hours underneath and your own lane. Everybody else is named normally, so a row can perfectly well name you while you are only a member, or say nothing about you at all while it is running fine for somebody else.
The code sits under the name, first on the line with the description, so you can still run your eye down the list for it.
Two tags appear beside a rotation’s name:
- Disabled when the rotation is switched off. It announces nothing and rotates nobody, so On duty reads No one and Next shift is empty. Whoever was holding the duty keeps it and gets it back when you switch the rotation on again, and you can see them on the rotation’s Coverage tab.
- Not a member on a rotation you are not in, which you only see when you are looking at everyone’s rotations.
When nobody is on call
Section titled “When nobody is on call”Paused means cover is shut right now and comes back at the hour named underneath. That is an arrangement rather than a problem: a rotation covering working hours is paused every night.
A rotation running with nobody to reach says so in amber, and says why: no members to put on duty, or a window is open with nobody in it. Open the rotation’s Coverage tab to see which.
Where things happen
Section titled “Where things happen”Rotations are created and configured in the dashboard. Slack is where the day-to-day happens: handover announcements, rotation cards, /rr, and mentions. You can also do both conversationally through an AI assistant.
Next steps
Section titled “Next steps”- Install Round Robin, if you have not already.
- Create a rotation: you will be live in a couple of minutes.
- Round Robin in Slack: the map of everything the bot does.