GitHub for Project Management

Jonathan Peake

What are GitHub Projects?

  • Adaptable, flexible tool for planning and tracking work on GitHub

  • Spreadsheet, task-board, and roadmap integrated with issues and pull requests

  • Provide multiple views by filtering, sorting, grouping issues/PRs

  • Visualize work with configurable charts

  • Add custom fields to track team-specific metadata

Why use GitHub for project management?

  • Issues and projects stoke collaboration

  • Issues act as short-term to-do lists

  • Projects capture longer-term goals and organize short-term issues

Project views

Table layout - Excel-style spreadsheet of project issues and metadata

Project views

Board layout - Kanban-style board for organizing issues by status or label

Project views

Roadmap layout- High-level visualization of project over time

Customizing Project Views

Fields (Table and Board layouts)

  • Based on issue metadata

  • In Table view, these add columns to the table to let you view, sort, and filter

  • In Board view, these are shown on each board item

  • Fully customizable

Grouping (All layouts)

  • Horizontally split issues by certain aspects of an issue (metadata)

Sorting (All layouts)

  • Sort project issues by issue metadata

  • Multi-field sorting available

  • Can sort ascending or descending

  • Can manually sort by dragging and dropping issues

Slicing (All layouts)

  • Split issues by metadata fields into subsets of issues

  • More akin to filtering than grouping

Field sum (Board layout only)

  • Add a count of the number of issues in each section of the board

Roadmap features

  • Date fields

    • Used to set start and end dates

    • Iterations: special date fields for repeating blocks of time

  • Vertical markers

    • Adds a vertical marker to show iterations, dates, and milestones

  • Zoom level

    • Change density and zoom level of roadmap: month, quarter, and year

Filters

  • Add field-based filters to further customize views

  • Can be used for very specific purposes and are saved with each view

  • Combine filters across fields for hyper-specific filtering

Adding views

  • You can have multiple views in one project

  • Views can be tailored to many different needs through layouts, fields, and filters

  • Views can be temporary for a single session or saved to the project