An Introduction to Github Project Boards
Learn everything you need to easily create and effectively use Github’s free project management tool.
If you are part of a software development life cycle as a developer, an interface designer, a technical writer, Q&A personnel, product manager or project manager, there must have been a time when everybody working on the same project needs a central system to access, monitor,update, record or report progress of work. This is where a project board comes in really handy.
A project board is basically a collection of card-like columns designed for teams for effective project assessment, documentation, monitoring and reporting work in progress.
Github Project Boards
There are a couple of project management tools available today, but we are going to in this article see a very free and popular Project Board by Github. If you are very conversant with open source technology like github, you most likely have seen the project tab on a github repository before. (if you have not, take a few seconds and create a github account here)
These projects consists of pull requests, notes and issues which you organize as cards in columns of your choice, github gives you absolute control over the project board and has options to automate events.
Types of Github Project Boards
- Repository project boards: These are project boards belonging to a particular repository, although they can include notes that can refer to other repositories, they are scoped to just one repository.
- Organization-wide project boards: These are project boards belonging to Github Organizations which can contain five repositories in a single project board. This would then treat those repositories as pieces of one project.
Creating a Project (Board)
Once you click the green “create project” button, you should see an image like this one below.
Project Templates
As you can already see, it is really easy and free to setup and use a project board on github. Github also has some starter-templates you can use instead of worrying about setting everything up from scratch. Let me explain each one of them.
- Basic Kanban: This creates three colums To-do, In-progress and Done, here you have to manually move cards from one column to another without automation.
- Automated Kanban: This creates three colums To-do, In-progress and Done and also lets you automate the processes of moving cards from column to column.
- Automated Kanban with Review: This creates three colums To-do, In-progress and Done and also lets you automate the processes of moving cards from column to column. It also comes with an additional shiny feature that lets you set triggers for pull request and reviews.
- Bug Triage: Triage and prioritize bugs with To do, High priority, Low priority, and Closed columns.
Conclusion
So this is a very quick introduction to Github Project Boards. I just recently started using it and found it to be really helpful and most of all free. My favorite template is the Automated Kanban as it helps move cards around on its own based on a set of rules. I would like to know if you have tried Github Project Boards, so leave a response.
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