GitHub announces general availability of Projects

Built like a spreadsheet, GitHub Projects was designed to let teams plan, collaborate and track work in a central location to stay organized.

GitHub has announced the general availability of its new Projects powered by GitHub Issues.

The new GitHub Projects connects a user’s planning to the work a team is doing in GitHub and adapts to the team’s needs, the company said. Built like a spreadsheet, project tables give users “a live canvas to filter, sort, and group issues and pull requests. You can use it, or the accompanying project board, along with custom fields, to track a sprint, plan a feature, or manage a large-scale release.”

The launch aims to enable users to get more out of the GitHub Projects tables, boards, automation and charts. Work can be planned and tracked and users can collaborate and stay organized with custom fields in a view that resembles a spreadsheet-like table or board, the company said.

Features of GitHub Projects tables and boards

Users can look at data from different perspectives with the new GitHub Projects. They can group and pivot issues by stage, priority, status, assignee or any custom field.

New capabilities:

• Rank, sort and group within a table by any custom field
• Create draft issues with detailed descriptions and metadata
• Materialize any perspective with tokenized filtering and saved views
• Customize cards and group-by in project boards
• Real-time project updates and user presence indicators

Users have the ability to customize data

GitHub Projects is also designed to let users define priorities, labels, assignees, OKRs, reviewers and QA stages, among other concepts with a type system that adapts to their processes and workflows.

New capabilities:

• Define custom fields of type: text, number, date, iteration and single select
• Configure iterations with flexible date ranges and breaks to represent your sprints, cycles or quarterly roadmap
• View linked pull requests and reviewers in both table and board views

SEE: Hiring kit: Project manager (TechRepublic Premium)

Quick charts

Charts can be configured to track cycle velocity, current work status and complex visualizations like cumulative flow diagrams.

New capabilities:

• Create and configure custom bar, column, line and stacked area charts
• Use aggregation functions like sum, count, average, min and max to get the proper insight
• Persist charts and share them with a URL to keep everyone in the know

Enable robots to handle busy work

Software teams no longer have to spend hours updating issues, keeping spreadsheets up-to-date and generating status reports, the company said. With built-in workflows and APIs, users can enlist robots to automate as much of the process as possible so they can focus on the critical items.

New capabilities:

• GraphQL ProjectsV2 API
• GitHub app project scopes
• Webhooks events for project item metadata updates
• GitHub Action to automate adding issues to projects

SEE: Top keyboard shortcuts you need to know (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

Looking ahead for GitHub Projects

GitHub Projects will continue evolving, the company said. The focus over the next two quarters will be on continuous improvement of the day-to-day scenarios plus delivering the following roadmap features.

Dependencies and relationships

Better ways to link the work that is happening. Use parent-child, duplicate, depend on and block relationships in issues and projects to keep everyone aligned.

Richer and more complex workflows

New automation capabilities with the goal of providing custom triggers, conditionals and action logic to adapt the project to users’ needs.

Timeline layout

Visualize work in a timeline to understand task duration and the ordering of the work ahead. The view will also support group-by to quickly segment the work by team, initiative or product line.

GitHub on mobile

Open and work with Issues and Projects from anywhere and anytime.