Using Zenhub for managing work in progress

[Ingo Schommer]

Hello everyone,

You might be aware that SilverStripe Ltd. has a team dedicated to open source, with individuals being either half-time or full-time members.

At the moment this consists of Hamish, Damian, Paul and myself - with our Scrum Master Marcello.

We're just switching from Scrum to Kanban, and need to manage our backlog effectively. So far we've used JIRA, while at the same time keeping much of the comms out in the open through Github issues duplicated into JIRA. There's other work mixed in as well, such as managing security releases where we obviously can't disclose issues publicly beforehand. 

In order to make our day-to-day work more transparent to the community, and foster wider participation and feedback, we've decided to use Github issues as our main way to track work. So you can see what each of us is working on. If you subscribe to issues via Github, you'll get notified when work starts and pull requests are raised.

Our combined repos have well over 1000 issues, so in order to manage priorities we're using a Github "plugin" called Zenhub. It's a browser extension which adds new features to github.com, and mixes in it's own views and data. You can install it for free on your own browser to see our board: https://github.com/silverstripe/silverstripe-framework#boards. Here's a screenshot: http://take.ms/q6LkQ

In order to change the card status on the board, you need write permissions on the repo. For now, we don't expect anybody outside of the core team to move cards there. You can submit issues and comment on them as usual through Github, all of these will show up in Zenhub - it's just a slightly more sophisticated view into the same data. 

This also means we're filing more "enhancement" issues on repos, which has been a bit of a grey area before. As a rule of thumb, "enhancement" issues are just allowed in core repos if the reporter (or reporting team) expects to fix them in the next few months. It's not a free-for-all for good ideas and intentions, we can discuss those on the mailinglist and through uservoice :)

Our Github repos already have milestones and labels which. We'll continue to keep our uservoice account and roadmap up to date, this only relates to much smaller work items. It also doesn't change anything in the volume or nature of issues we're planning to work on, it's just a different way of planning it.

Thanks

Ingo

--

Ingo Schommer | Solutions Architect
SilverStripe (http://silverstripe.com)
Mobile: 0221601782
Skype: chillu23

[David Alexander]

Nice plugin!

[Simon Erkelens]

+1

ZenHub is quite nice!

Although, switching between issues and board is a bit confusing. But that's an issue for ZenHub.

I suggest creating a few more categories, maybe add "in discussion"? For some issues, it's a bit unclear what the current status is.

[Simon Erkelens]

I just noticed, ZenHub also adds a to-do list to GitHub! That's kinda cool.