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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. Duty size is how many people hold it at once (default 1).
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.
Business hours The hours of the day a rotation is actually staffed. Outside them nobody is on duty. How they work.
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 or OpsGenie says so. Round Robin mirrors their schedule and does not decide anything. Linking an external schedule.

The three things a rotation row tells you

Section titled “The three things a rotation row tells you”

In the dashboard’s rotation list each row carries up to three badges. They are three independent facts, not one status — reading them as a single “state” is the usual way to get confused:

  • Your shift — what is happening to you on this rotation: On duty until 18:00, On duty · paused until 09:00 (business hours), You’re next, or nothing at all.
  • Your role — Owner or Member, or nothing if you are neither. This says what you may change, not whether you are on call.
  • Lifecycle — Disabled when the rotation is switched off. A disabled rotation announces nothing and rotates nobody.

A rotation can perfectly well show you as On duty while you are only a member, or show nothing at all while it is running fine for somebody else.

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”