Founded in 1908, General Motors designs and manufactures a wide variety of vehicles that meet the needs and expectations of drivers around the globe.

GM’s continued success requires its software developers to integrate an expanding number of software applications into their workflow. To do so, they use several unique applications to design, develop, test, and maintain software. Having to frequently maneuver between these applications hinders the development process.

To enable collaboration and teamwork, GM developers use Microsoft Teams; a chat-based workspace. Developers are members of a channel, which is specific to their team where they can chat, manage files, and access external applications.

Our DevBot for Microsoft Teams system (Plato) extends the functionality of Microsoft Teams through the creation of three separate but cohesive applications.

Our first Plato app is an artificially intelligent chatbot that enables team members to create and manage virtual machines and test cases. A graphical web dashboard embedded into Microsoft Teams in the form of a tab is our second extension. Our third app is a Microsoft Teams connector that enables the team to configure regular notifications about the system’s activity.

GM developers using our apps have full control over their resources and can monitor resource allocation, run tests and update the status of virtual machines all within a familiar Microsoft Teams environment.

Our Plato system is designed with the Microsoft Bot Framework, Microsoft LUIS, C# with .NET, AngularJS, HTML and CSS, and is deployed into Microsoft Teams.