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New GitHub Issues Beta

599 points by splitbrain 5y ago

thinkingkong 5y ago
Nice. Github has all the incentives and infrastructure in place to build all the layers on top of the repositories and existing social network. Ive seen a bunch of companies launch with competing project boards, ci systems, etc but its not clear how you carve out a space for yourself from within a set of reasonable defaults.
smusamashah 5y ago
Github should first fix that it displays "issues" of a repository instead of useful info when exploring https://github.com/explore https://github.com/explore Why would I want to see issues of a repo I have no clue about? I am there just to discover a new repo.
- linkdd 5y ago
  I've noticed since Microsoft acquired Github, the "explore" tab has been more and more useless. It's been months since it displays me the same repositories, and significantly less than before. I don't know if it's related, but the timing is suspicious.
  - TimWolla 5y ago
    I find it interesting that it sometimes shows my very own repositories (or repositories of one of my organizations) within the 'Explore repositories' section on the dashboard. As if I didn't know those repositories yet.
  - eyelidlessness 5y ago
    I sort by date to get around this and it helps a lot. Side note: I also do this in HN Algolia search and it still annoys me that the default sort setting doesn’t work.
  - madeofpalk 5y ago
    Explore has been… unuseful to me for years before MS bought GitHub.
- momothereal 5y ago
  It's for people that want to find issues to work on in random repos, I suppose.
- derpixeldan 5y ago
  It does not only show issues, but also other content. What would you consider useful information?
WillAbides 5y ago
related blog post: https://github.blog/2021-06-23-introducing-new-github-issues/ https://github.blog/2021-06-23-introducing-new-github-issues...
TimWolla 5y ago
I'm more interested in GitHub's Issue Forms (as an evolution of Issue Templates): https://twitter.com/frenck/status/1355620350176976901 https://twitter.com/frenck/status/1355620350176976901 Does anyone know what the status of these is?
- cridenour 5y ago
  > Dive into work faster with issue forms and templates Looks like its the same alpha/beta.
  - TimWolla 5y ago
    Thanks. I missed that list item, because it did not have a corresponding screenshot / screencast.
- martinwoodward 5y ago
  Shipped today. https://github.blog/changelog/2021-06-23-issues-forms-beta-for-public-repositories/ https://github.blog/changelog/2021-06-23-issues-forms-beta-f...
- tomwas54 5y ago
  It's announced here as also being in beta for public repos: https://github.blog/changelog/2021-06-23-issues-forms-beta-for-public-repositories/ https://github.blog/changelog/2021-06-23-issues-forms-beta-f...
  - felixfbecker 5y ago
    I cannot comprehend why GitHub chose to let people define the form elements in YAML (!) instead of simply allowing <input>, <select> and <textarea> in Markdown. One of the most beautiful aspects of Markdown is that it supports HTML. It's trivial to allow only a minimal set of attributes, like `required`.
- arp242 5y ago
  I kind of hate this to be honest. I understand why maintainers use them, because "i am having issues running it, plz halp", but IMHO two paragraphs of a well-written report which contains all the information is better than: == Describe the problem (huge header) == Description of the the problem. == What did you expect? == That it worked == What did you get? == A repeat of the problem statement. == Which version did you use? == Repeat of what I wrote in the description where I mentioned I tried latest release 1.2.3 and the latest master. etc. I generally delete these templates, making sure the requested information is all in there of course. It almost always saves significant amount of space and makes things easier to read. I haven't had any complaints thus far.
rbarnes01 5y ago
This looks like a great step forward. I always found it interesting that proposed enhancements are thrown into Issues. Maybe it's the word "issues" itself because I associate it with a negative connotation.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tyingq 5y ago
I wonder how tense things are over at Atlassian right now. Jira seems so universally hated that it feels like any competition that ticks a few basic needs could start hurting them.
- bovermyer 5y ago
  Probably not that tense. A lot of enterprises with Very Big Licenses are hard-locked into Atlassian products with little to no chance of changing.
  - addicted 5y ago
    I suspect that Azure Dev Ops is more comparable to Jira and is their real MS competition.
  - ErrantX 5y ago
    So, yeh I partly agree. However those orgs often have a Very Big License for GitHub Enterprise, and therefore with some enterprise porting tools it's not that high friction a switch (supplier managers will be all in favour; one less contract to manage!)
    - robinhood 5y ago
      They mostly don't. Once you have Jira, you have Confluence, then Bitbucket. That many less contracts to manage.
      - foobarbazetc 5y ago
        Yeah. We used to pay for GH Enterprise and run Jira/Confluence/Bamboo/etc/etc. Then we switched to BitBucket Server because it integrates better and cost a lot less, plus GH Enterprise was a weird black box VM back then that we had to hack into to make work for whatever reason. I couldn't point you to anyone who likes BitBucket Server, but as long as you're on the CLI and don't have to use the terrible web UI too much, it sort of works.
nthngtshr 5y ago
rip zenhub
eyelidlessness 5y ago
> Extend issues with custom fields Further support for my theory that every Trello eventually becomes a Jira.
- munificent 5y ago
  Die a Trello or live long enough to become a Jira.
  - eyelidlessness 5y ago
    It’s funny because I can obviously see the value in the features they’re adding. It’s not ridiculous for people to want more control over task management in GitHub. The thing that makes me sad about this is how customizable it is. Especially from GitHub, which has a pretty good track record of providing a good UX that mostly works well without such open ended customization. I used to look at GitHub as a great example of providing a good experience because the experience is opinionated. All things come to an end, but I certainly wasn’t expecting “we have the most basic-but-integrated kanban board you could imagine” -> “we aped all the features of Trello and AirTable without scrutiny” without some intermediate step.
  - ksec 5y ago
    God this is Good. It also capture so much not just on Trello or Jira but Software in general.
hi_mom 5y ago
I am longing for the day they deprecate Azure Devops and merge it into GitHub Enterprise. This is the only way I’ll ever get the ability to work with GitHub in my company, which has a much superior UI/UX imo.
- foepys 5y ago
  Azure DevOps is quite a bit more advanced than GitHub. Is there a feature that GitHub has that is missing from Azure DevOps? UX is very subjective and while DevOps is not perfect, I don't find it straight up horrible. It has way more features that need a place in the UI. Plus it's lightning fast compared to JIRA.
  - easton 5y ago
    It's extremely confusing the way the repos work in Azure DevOps as compared to GitHub, the only way you can see which one you are working on is through the little tab on the top. Since this also controls what PRs show up, about once every day or two I'll click on "pull requests" and be super confused as to why there's no PRs present until I realize "oh! I was browsing the other repo earlier that's why." Especially when issues and everything else are not connected to repos in any way, this is a weird UX decision. At least put the name of the repo next to the pull requests button like in GitHub, so I see where I am before I click.
  - aetherspawn 5y ago
    Azure DevOps seems to be full of interface bugs and gotchas, and the UX is a whole magnitude poorer in execution compared to GitHub. Also the whole Microsoft SSO flow gives me serious problems when switching between my 3-4 Microsoft accounts, and means I have to keep opening up incognito tabs. GitHub organizations are so much better at this. And does nobody else find the URL schema of Azure DevOps highly confusing? You seem to be able to load up the same dashboards from 5-6 different URLs, and some days certain URLs don't work and others do, and I just have no idea where to land for the front page half the time! The only way I know how to quickly get to my org in Azure DevOps is by the several shortcuts on my desktop. If I lost it, I'd be screwed. And I find it so jank that you have to go into a completely separate area and click through several tabs with page refreshes to find the ticket list for a project, and even then the backlog view is not intuitive to use.
hairofadog 5y ago
I can't tell if they've handled it here, but one of the things I'd love to see is a "friendly" view into issues for non-coders. In my experience, when a non-coder sees something that "looks like code" they become confused and frightened and generally avoid the interface.
telaandrews 5y ago
It floors me that they haven't addressed the underlying architecture issues that made Issues unusable: Issues are only for a single repo. Business users don't (and shouldn't) know what repo to add an Issue to. This is why we moved away from Issues and none of these new visualizations make the product usable until they deliver multi-repo issues.
- cyral 5y ago
  You can use projects for this (it is what we do). Create a project for the org where non business people can add issues/todo's to and then developers can click "Create Issue" on them and create a more detailed issue for the appropriate repo.
  - tomjakubowski 5y ago
    Yes, that's exactly it. Project boards, spanning multiple repositories, have been on Github for years; seems by the comments in this thread that Github isn't advertising them well enough!
    - mchusma 5y ago
      Wow, we haven't used Github for years because it was missing this feature. I saw the new beta and looked if they supported cross-repo issues, and was disappointed. Turns out, they do? They just make it very hard to discover? Odd. Seems like low hanging fruit to fix.
  - SahAssar 5y ago
    Those are text-only and don't support comments, labels, statuses, markdown or basically any of the other things that might make issues useable. There are issues that apply to a whole org. There are "non business people" that know how to add context to an issue but not exactly in which repo it might fit best. "Notes on a board" is not a replacement for org-level issues.
    - fbcpck 5y ago
jmcphers 5y ago
This doesn't seem to have the one feature I want most, which is the ability to track the status of projects and milestones that span multiple repositories. Anyone know if this is there and they didn't mention it, or is on the roadmap?
- mariorod 5y ago
  Yes, this is one of the main scenarios we are enabling in the Fall. Project tables and custom fields are already cross-repo enabled in the beta.
  - jmcphers 5y ago
    Oh sweet! This is great news, thank you.
  - FionnMc 5y ago
    Mariorod! As a company currently using GitHub issues, is there any way to jump onto the beta program quicker?
Groxx 5y ago
"it's just a spreadsheet, and [view X] is a filter on that sheet" is a nice mental model. I've had lots of managers organize stuff in google sheets and then copy to [task manager X] simply because it's easier to think about - they'd probably love this. I certainly would, vs Jira's massive "everything is custom UI / a unique concept" mess.
- alooPotato 5y ago
  Their spreadsheet implementation looks really nice (from the screenshots). Can't wait to try it. Our primary interface at Streak is a spreadsheet. It looks simple to build but we've invested (and continue to invest) a ton of engineering time to making it great. Users love the interaction model like you said.
- agentdrtran 5y ago
  Their spreadsheet view reminds of Airtable a bit, or the notion-like tools that are very popular right now.
- dempsey 5y ago
  Yes! We use a Google Sheet to track subtasks of issues. Now maybe we won't have to. Breaking every subtask into its own issue is too much and using the Project tool has a similar problem where it can become overwhelmingly noisy. Spreadsheet style lists are the cleanest way to see a lot quickly.
- SkyPuncher 5y ago
  We're constantly amazed at how often we use Trello only for the purpose of drafting and organizing stories before we copy/paste them into Jira.
- adt2bt 5y ago
  That, plus keyboard shortcuts for everything means developers will love it as well. This really feels slick.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- 5y ago
KaoruAoiShiho 5y ago
When will gitlab get this?
- john_cogs 5y ago
  GitLab provides issues, boards, epics, time tracking, road maps, and more as part of the Plan stage: https://about.gitlab.com/stages-devops-lifecycle/plan/ https://about.gitlab.com/stages-devops-lifecycle/plan/
  - KaoruAoiShiho 5y ago
    Yes but with as nice of a UX.
munchkinship 5y ago
So for a non-developer that wishes to collaborate, they now need a GitHub license? That's a deal-breaker right there for any org that is composed of more than developers.
- SilverRed 5y ago
  At my org we just have one user with reporter permissions on gitlab which is shared by a bunch of people who just write their name at the end of tickets or comments. For more involved people who need to be assigned to things or pinged, they pay the full license.
gnachman 5y ago
If anyone from Github is here, can you please allow attachments of unrecognized file types? You won't let users attach their binary .plist prefs files and this makes Github issues unusable for my project.
- mariorod 5y ago
  As you can guess there is a lot we do when it comes to attachments to keep the platform safe, which includes having an allow list of them. Now, I agree there is room for improvement and are looking into an attachment API that will address this.
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    Can't you already attach arbitrary files as part of a tagged release? You can also direct link to any file you want which works the same as if it was uploaded. I'm not sure the file whitelist is adding any security here.
javier123454321 5y ago
But will they link Pull Requests to issues anytime soon?
alberth 5y ago
Question: how does the Table view headings reconcile to the Board view? On the Table view, there is a heading for: "Prototype", "Beta" and "Launch" https://github.githubassets.com/images/modules/site/planning-tracking/layout-table.png https://github.githubassets.com/images/modules/site/planning... But when you look at the Board view, I don't see "Prototype", "Beta" or "Launch" denoted anywhere on the card. https://github.githubassets.com/images/modules/site/planning-tracking/layout-board.png https://github.githubassets.com/images/modules/site/planning...
- TGRHavoc 5y ago
  By looks of it, they're milestones :)
  - alberth 5y ago
    But how do the milestones get surfaced on the Board view?
bob1029 5y ago
Really looking forward to the boards & ability to split check boxes out into new tasks. Being able to decompose business issues into workable technical items has always been a challenge for us. The impedance of needing to create a new issue and copy stuff over from the big one would encourage us to not always do this.
FionnMc 5y ago
As a PM who recently moved our eng team from Jira to GitHub (it was a good move btw), this is amazing news! It solves so many of the little problems that GitHub issue caused us, really looking forward to using it!
sandGorgon 5y ago
if someone from github is looking at this, can u please include Gitlab's "Scoped Labels" in this - https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/labels.html#scoped-labels https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/labels.html#scoped-l... it seems that the new issues are going to operate on the basis of labels (as it should). Scoped/Nested labels are a godsend. For example, I can tag an issue with a label "UI::App::Android" and i should be able to filter on the basis of "UI::App" and get all issues. One of the things i still notice about the boards is that it is created on the basis of status. Gitlab's boards are created on milestones/status...or LABELS. https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/issue_board.html#organization-of-topics https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/issue_board.html#org... Most importantly, dragging tickets across boards will change the labels. This is far more powerful than just hardcoding them on statuses.
- bostonsre 5y ago
  Why not just tag it with separate labels? For that example, tag it with ui, app, and android. Then search with ui and app labels?
  - coffeemug 5y ago
    For the same reason you ever need hierarchies-- without scoped labels you end up with a confusing soup of labels that's very difficult to make sense of. And the more labels you get, the harder everything becomes.
    - bostonsre 5y ago
      hrm.. I guess I could see that being useful in some cases. It might make discovery a little harder for someone that doesn't know the hierarchy, but I could see that being useful for people that know the hierarchy in an org that has a massive amount of stuff to label. I guess I just like key/value tags better than labels to organize and filter through data. They seem a little more self explanatory and I think they obviate the need of a hierarchy in the tag key naming.
    - jayd16 5y ago
jrochkind1 5y ago
> Automatically add issues to a project, That was the one thing I actually absolutely needed missing from current "Projects". Seems like such a simple basic thing, but the fact that I couldn't make it so a new issue created automatically showed up on a project board was a stopper for me.
aparsons 5y ago
I am NOT envious of Zenhub right now!
rawfan 5y ago
There is currently a move to disable issues (in opensource projects) and the driving factor behind this, is that other people can basically put stuff on your todo-list. What would be better: - make issues read-only for non-members - track problems in discussions. often they're not really bugs and other people can directly help. If not, I'll convert the discussion to an issue when appropriate. Benefit: bugs as discussions can be upvoted or downvoted so the community helps prioritizing.
- Arnavion 5y ago
  I haven't used Discussions, but why doesn't Issues already do what you're asking for? You don't have to consider every open issue as your TODO list; use one or more "Triaged" labels for that. And voting on issues already exists.
- SilverRed 5y ago
  I have not seen such a move in any of the projects I have looked at. Repo maintainers have either just allowed feature requests and ignore them but leave them there for either someone else to chip in on or just to show that it has already been requested. Or they will just close feature requests.
- fergie 5y ago
  I am pretty deep into open source, and have not done this myself, or seen this anywhere? Examples?
- pyr0hu 5y ago
  Yeah, but the issues page is NOT a todo-list.
dreamcompiler 5y ago
I don't use GitHub Issues [much] because I was under the impression that issues are not themselves stored as a git repo, but rather they are some kind of proprietary database GitHub maintains. Thus they create lockin for GitHub. Am I wrong about this?
- Kaze404 5y ago
  Yes. Issues are a Github feature, not a Git feature.
- mynameisvlad 5y ago
  I mean, isn't that the case for practically any issue tracking system? Which ones store their issue (and comments, etc) within the repo?
  - Kaze404 5y ago
    Fossil! https://www.fossil-scm.org/ https://www.fossil-scm.org/
- baby 5y ago
  Why are you using Github if not for their social features?
  - Lorin 5y ago
    Github's social/discovery features are too strong - it makes it difficult to justify keeping OS projects on GitLab even if the feature set is better for maintainers
  - dreamcompiler 5y ago
    I can't tell if you're joking, but if not I use it because it's a reliable, free git server.
    - baby 5y ago
      Not sure why you’d think that. Maybe this is common in your circle but I don’t know anyone who uses github just to host a remote repo.
dboreham 5y ago
There's still nothing available today that's remotely as useful as Bugzilla, imho.
baby 5y ago
This is probably the slickest landing page I have seen in the last two years.
ed_blackburn 5y ago
What ever happened to Fogbugz?
- c17r 5y ago
  Still around, https://fogbugz.com/ https://fogbugz.com/ but owned by somebody other than Fog Creek.
  - oblio 5y ago
    Fogbugz is Fog Creek :-)
    - c17r 5y ago
      FogBugz was renamed to Manuscript in 2017 and sold to DevFactory in 2018 who renamed it back to FogBugz. Fog Creek renamed themselves in 2018 to Glitch after their Glitch product.
- shadytrees 5y ago
  The lone and level sands stretch far away
fancy_pantser 5y ago
The UI, down to the content and styling of menus, looks a lot like Linear. I'm chuffed to see the best parts being borrowed, but it looks like they've made sub-tasks/issues too simple, as they aren't first-class issues, but mere checkboxes with short descriptions. https://linear.app https://linear.app
- alkonaut 5y ago
  On the other hand the “tasks are as heavyweight as the bugs or backlog items that spawned them” (often with just one task ie 1:1) creates a ton of overhead in e.g Azure Devops. Especially as efforts get spread out while rollup barely works. It’s also unclear whether PRs should be linked to tasks or the parent issue. I want more than a checkbox but less than an issue. A completion % and owner would be enough.
- armandososa 5y ago
  I often edit the description of an issue in linear just to breakdown the task using "markdown" checkboxes. In my mind: issues should correspond to a pull request and checkboxes to commits.
greatgib 5y ago
Omg, they did a copy of Asana. And not a copy of the good part, but a copy of the useless unergonomic eye candy parts ... And I hate so much Asana... It is so inefficient and frustrating to use. So, please, fire the designer that proposed this change before it can become mainstream. I don't understand the hype about the "board" thing. I guess that people think that they look cool and doing agile by using a board. But compare that to a normal table that you can reorder by columns based on your wishes...
- HatchedLake721 5y ago
  What view and UI you think would be the most efficient for this?
plasma 5y ago
I was hoping to see it mentioned that a collaborator can just be given issues permission (no code access), I’m assuming that’s still not possible?
thoughtpeddler 5y ago
Wow, there's a lot of Airtable in here. My team used GitHub Issues/Projects for a while, but ultimately moved to a custom Airtable solution for project management, release management, etc which gave us the tables, views, filters, groups, you name it. Seems like someone at GitHub got the notice about users wanting that more flexible UI/UX. Good on them!
dorian-graph 5y ago
Reminds me of https://height.app/ https://height.app/. I highly recommend giving it a go.
dancemethis 5y ago
Proprietary platform, quite an easy pass.
quicklime 5y ago
> Bored of boards? Switch to tables. I love this. I don’t know why the “agile board” became a thing. To me it always seemed like a poor way to visualize what is a list of items. My problem with agile boards is that they place tasks into separate columns to denote the task state, which often cuts off the task description (and can require a lot of horizontal scrolling). It also prevents using columns for other fields like the Assignee (as the table view in the new GitHub Issues does).
- djrockstar1 5y ago
  Yeah I think the design was made with an analog board in mind, where moving a task is easier than changing its state in place. But for a digital board tables definitely make more sense.
- theptip 5y ago
  My take on the background of why it became a thing: I think the idea with boards is that the (artificial) constraints of the medium are helpful in certain team configurations. As far as I'm aware, boards are most strongly advocated in Kanban, where there's a hard limit on WIP -- so having a board where you actually cannot have more than 10 items in your backlog before everything goes to hell is a feature not a bug. In Kanban, it's really important to be able to see at a glance, where your WIP is in the pipeline, e.g. you don't want to start a new task when there's a huge backlog of tasks waiting to be validated. In a table, you lose the ability to get a birds-eye view of the sprint status. Most teams aren't doing Kanban though -- so I think it's plausible that most teams will find a table view more usable/efficient.
fairpoints777 5y ago
Timing in this is perfect for us. Having yet another tool and custom apis or zapiers adds a lot of friction, we were going for I think zenhub but this will suffice
ageyfman 5y ago
they built notion boards into github. nice work! we've been using notion for our product work and it's been very flexible and powerful, but I do miss having the code and issues living together.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Xunjin 5y ago
Are you people still with status "on waiting". I'm looking forward to this.
aikinai 5y ago
In case the GitHub Issues team is still looking here, I have a request! Can you put the name of the commenter somewhere besides just the name field in the email from? Currently it's something like, Poster Name <notifications.github.com>, but that means you can't tell who the poster was from the email content itself. I use Apple Mail and have a contact for GitHub since that provides benefits like an avatar, easier search, etc, but now the contact clobbers the name field and I just see every email from "GitHub" with zero indication who wrote the comment.
quickthrower2 5y ago
Is there any info on how this would help with estimation and planning of a large number of tasks. E.g. "what can we get done this quarter?" I have an eye on https://www.openproject.org/ https://www.openproject.org/ because it seems to have these sort of features. I currently use Excel for this.
moralestapia 5y ago
Airtable is the most amazing thing that has happened to UI in years and it's really nice to see their ideas crawling on to other contexts like GitHub here.
minikomi 5y ago
I'll throw my random feature request in here since everyone else is: Ability to write github comments as org mode instead of markdown
- arp242 5y ago
  I wish it would just support "proper" Markdown where line breaks aren't treated as hard breaks. Makes it so much easier to copy stuff from Vim etc. I spend an inordinate amount of time J'ing lines together in Vim just to copy something to GitHub.
yukinon 5y ago
I'd like to be able to run reporting out of this so I can gather velocity metrics (for my boss) at the developer/project/milestone/arbitrary label level. It doesn't look like there are too options for this yet.
sudcha 5y ago
Oh me and everyone I know have been waiting for this. Why use any other Issue tracker if Github can do this itself? Countless integrations would be replaced by this. I wonder what would happen to all those dashboard / issue tracker / project tracking apps now.
softveda 5y ago
I am surprised no one has mentioned Asana.
WhyNotHugo 5y ago
I've mixed feelings. On one side, I like seeing something different to the crap that is Jira. Every single large company out there seems to use it and it's terrible. OTOH, not sure if I'm happy that the only new competition is a Microsoft product.

599 points by splitbrain 5y ago

Nice. Github has all the incentives and infrastructure in place to build all the layers on top of the repositories and existing social network. Ive seen a bunch of companies launch with competing project boards, ci systems, etc but its not clear how you carve out a space for yourself from within a set of reasonable defaults.

smusamashah 5y ago

Github should first fix that it displays "issues" of a repository instead of useful info when exploring https://github.com/explore https://github.com/explore Why would I want to see issues of a repo I have no clue about? I am there just to discover a new repo.

linkdd 5y ago
I've noticed since Microsoft acquired Github, the "explore" tab has been more and more useless. It's been months since it displays me the same repositories, and significantly less than before. I don't know if it's related, but the timing is suspicious.
- TimWolla 5y ago
  I find it interesting that it sometimes shows my very own repositories (or repositories of one of my organizations) within the 'Explore repositories' section on the dashboard. As if I didn't know those repositories yet.
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  I sort by date to get around this and it helps a lot. Side note: I also do this in HN Algolia search and it still annoys me that the default sort setting doesn’t work.
- madeofpalk 5y ago
  Explore has been… unuseful to me for years before MS bought GitHub.
momothereal 5y ago
It's for people that want to find issues to work on in random repos, I suppose.
derpixeldan 5y ago
It does not only show issues, but also other content. What would you consider useful information?

WillAbides 5y ago

related blog post: https://github.blog/2021-06-23-introducing-new-github-issues/ https://github.blog/2021-06-23-introducing-new-github-issues...

TimWolla 5y ago

I'm more interested in GitHub's Issue Forms (as an evolution of Issue Templates): https://twitter.com/frenck/status/1355620350176976901 https://twitter.com/frenck/status/1355620350176976901 Does anyone know what the status of these is?

cridenour 5y ago
> Dive into work faster with issue forms and templates Looks like its the same alpha/beta.
- TimWolla 5y ago
  Thanks. I missed that list item, because it did not have a corresponding screenshot / screencast.
martinwoodward 5y ago
Shipped today. https://github.blog/changelog/2021-06-23-issues-forms-beta-for-public-repositories/ https://github.blog/changelog/2021-06-23-issues-forms-beta-f...
tomwas54 5y ago
It's announced here as also being in beta for public repos: https://github.blog/changelog/2021-06-23-issues-forms-beta-for-public-repositories/ https://github.blog/changelog/2021-06-23-issues-forms-beta-f...
- felixfbecker 5y ago
  I cannot comprehend why GitHub chose to let people define the form elements in YAML (!) instead of simply allowing <input>, <select> and <textarea> in Markdown. One of the most beautiful aspects of Markdown is that it supports HTML. It's trivial to allow only a minimal set of attributes, like `required`.
arp242 5y ago
I kind of hate this to be honest. I understand why maintainers use them, because "i am having issues running it, plz halp", but IMHO two paragraphs of a well-written report which contains all the information is better than: == Describe the problem (huge header) == Description of the the problem. == What did you expect? == That it worked == What did you get? == A repeat of the problem statement. == Which version did you use? == Repeat of what I wrote in the description where I mentioned I tried latest release 1.2.3 and the latest master. etc. I generally delete these templates, making sure the requested information is all in there of course. It almost always saves significant amount of space and makes things easier to read. I haven't had any complaints thus far.

rbarnes01 5y ago

This looks like a great step forward. I always found it interesting that proposed enhancements are thrown into Issues. Maybe it's the word "issues" itself because I associate it with a negative connotation.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

tyingq 5y ago

I wonder how tense things are over at Atlassian right now. Jira seems so universally hated that it feels like any competition that ticks a few basic needs could start hurting them.

bovermyer 5y ago
Probably not that tense. A lot of enterprises with Very Big Licenses are hard-locked into Atlassian products with little to no chance of changing.
- addicted 5y ago
  I suspect that Azure Dev Ops is more comparable to Jira and is their real MS competition.
- ErrantX 5y ago
  So, yeh I partly agree. However those orgs often have a Very Big License for GitHub Enterprise, and therefore with some enterprise porting tools it's not that high friction a switch (supplier managers will be all in favour; one less contract to manage!)
  - robinhood 5y ago
    They mostly don't. Once you have Jira, you have Confluence, then Bitbucket. That many less contracts to manage.
    - foobarbazetc 5y ago
      Yeah. We used to pay for GH Enterprise and run Jira/Confluence/Bamboo/etc/etc. Then we switched to BitBucket Server because it integrates better and cost a lot less, plus GH Enterprise was a weird black box VM back then that we had to hack into to make work for whatever reason. I couldn't point you to anyone who likes BitBucket Server, but as long as you're on the CLI and don't have to use the terrible web UI too much, it sort of works.

nthngtshr 5y ago

rip zenhub

eyelidlessness 5y ago

> Extend issues with custom fields Further support for my theory that every Trello eventually becomes a Jira.

munificent 5y ago
Die a Trello or live long enough to become a Jira.
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  It’s funny because I can obviously see the value in the features they’re adding. It’s not ridiculous for people to want more control over task management in GitHub. The thing that makes me sad about this is how customizable it is. Especially from GitHub, which has a pretty good track record of providing a good UX that mostly works well without such open ended customization. I used to look at GitHub as a great example of providing a good experience because the experience is opinionated. All things come to an end, but I certainly wasn’t expecting “we have the most basic-but-integrated kanban board you could imagine” -> “we aped all the features of Trello and AirTable without scrutiny” without some intermediate step.
- ksec 5y ago
  God this is Good. It also capture so much not just on Trello or Jira but Software in general.

hi_mom 5y ago

I am longing for the day they deprecate Azure Devops and merge it into GitHub Enterprise. This is the only way I’ll ever get the ability to work with GitHub in my company, which has a much superior UI/UX imo.

foepys 5y ago
Azure DevOps is quite a bit more advanced than GitHub. Is there a feature that GitHub has that is missing from Azure DevOps? UX is very subjective and while DevOps is not perfect, I don't find it straight up horrible. It has way more features that need a place in the UI. Plus it's lightning fast compared to JIRA.
- easton 5y ago
  It's extremely confusing the way the repos work in Azure DevOps as compared to GitHub, the only way you can see which one you are working on is through the little tab on the top. Since this also controls what PRs show up, about once every day or two I'll click on "pull requests" and be super confused as to why there's no PRs present until I realize "oh! I was browsing the other repo earlier that's why." Especially when issues and everything else are not connected to repos in any way, this is a weird UX decision. At least put the name of the repo next to the pull requests button like in GitHub, so I see where I am before I click.
- aetherspawn 5y ago
  Azure DevOps seems to be full of interface bugs and gotchas, and the UX is a whole magnitude poorer in execution compared to GitHub. Also the whole Microsoft SSO flow gives me serious problems when switching between my 3-4 Microsoft accounts, and means I have to keep opening up incognito tabs. GitHub organizations are so much better at this. And does nobody else find the URL schema of Azure DevOps highly confusing? You seem to be able to load up the same dashboards from 5-6 different URLs, and some days certain URLs don't work and others do, and I just have no idea where to land for the front page half the time! The only way I know how to quickly get to my org in Azure DevOps is by the several shortcuts on my desktop. If I lost it, I'd be screwed. And I find it so jank that you have to go into a completely separate area and click through several tabs with page refreshes to find the ticket list for a project, and even then the backlog view is not intuitive to use.

hairofadog 5y ago

I can't tell if they've handled it here, but one of the things I'd love to see is a "friendly" view into issues for non-coders. In my experience, when a non-coder sees something that "looks like code" they become confused and frightened and generally avoid the interface.

telaandrews 5y ago

It floors me that they haven't addressed the underlying architecture issues that made Issues unusable: Issues are only for a single repo. Business users don't (and shouldn't) know what repo to add an Issue to. This is why we moved away from Issues and none of these new visualizations make the product usable until they deliver multi-repo issues.

cyral 5y ago
You can use projects for this (it is what we do). Create a project for the org where non business people can add issues/todo's to and then developers can click "Create Issue" on them and create a more detailed issue for the appropriate repo.
- tomjakubowski 5y ago
  Yes, that's exactly it. Project boards, spanning multiple repositories, have been on Github for years; seems by the comments in this thread that Github isn't advertising them well enough!
  - mchusma 5y ago
    Wow, we haven't used Github for years because it was missing this feature. I saw the new beta and looked if they supported cross-repo issues, and was disappointed. Turns out, they do? They just make it very hard to discover? Odd. Seems like low hanging fruit to fix.
- SahAssar 5y ago
  Those are text-only and don't support comments, labels, statuses, markdown or basically any of the other things that might make issues useable. There are issues that apply to a whole org. There are "non business people" that know how to add context to an issue but not exactly in which repo it might fit best. "Notes on a board" is not a replacement for org-level issues.
  - fbcpck 5y ago

jmcphers 5y ago

This doesn't seem to have the one feature I want most, which is the ability to track the status of projects and milestones that span multiple repositories. Anyone know if this is there and they didn't mention it, or is on the roadmap?

mariorod 5y ago
Yes, this is one of the main scenarios we are enabling in the Fall. Project tables and custom fields are already cross-repo enabled in the beta.
- jmcphers 5y ago
  Oh sweet! This is great news, thank you.
- FionnMc 5y ago
  Mariorod! As a company currently using GitHub issues, is there any way to jump onto the beta program quicker?

Groxx 5y ago

"it's just a spreadsheet, and [view X] is a filter on that sheet" is a nice mental model. I've had lots of managers organize stuff in google sheets and then copy to [task manager X] simply because it's easier to think about - they'd probably love this. I certainly would, vs Jira's massive "everything is custom UI / a unique concept" mess.

alooPotato 5y ago
Their spreadsheet implementation looks really nice (from the screenshots). Can't wait to try it. Our primary interface at Streak is a spreadsheet. It looks simple to build but we've invested (and continue to invest) a ton of engineering time to making it great. Users love the interaction model like you said.
agentdrtran 5y ago
Their spreadsheet view reminds of Airtable a bit, or the notion-like tools that are very popular right now.
dempsey 5y ago
Yes! We use a Google Sheet to track subtasks of issues. Now maybe we won't have to. Breaking every subtask into its own issue is too much and using the Project tool has a similar problem where it can become overwhelmingly noisy. Spreadsheet style lists are the cleanest way to see a lot quickly.
SkyPuncher 5y ago
We're constantly amazed at how often we use Trello only for the purpose of drafting and organizing stories before we copy/paste them into Jira.
adt2bt 5y ago
That, plus keyboard shortcuts for everything means developers will love it as well. This really feels slick.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
5y ago

KaoruAoiShiho 5y ago

When will gitlab get this?

john_cogs 5y ago
GitLab provides issues, boards, epics, time tracking, road maps, and more as part of the Plan stage: https://about.gitlab.com/stages-devops-lifecycle/plan/ https://about.gitlab.com/stages-devops-lifecycle/plan/
- KaoruAoiShiho 5y ago
  Yes but with as nice of a UX.

munchkinship 5y ago

So for a non-developer that wishes to collaborate, they now need a GitHub license? That's a deal-breaker right there for any org that is composed of more than developers.

SilverRed 5y ago
At my org we just have one user with reporter permissions on gitlab which is shared by a bunch of people who just write their name at the end of tickets or comments. For more involved people who need to be assigned to things or pinged, they pay the full license.

gnachman 5y ago

If anyone from Github is here, can you please allow attachments of unrecognized file types? You won't let users attach their binary .plist prefs files and this makes Github issues unusable for my project.

mariorod 5y ago
As you can guess there is a lot we do when it comes to attachments to keep the platform safe, which includes having an allow list of them. Now, I agree there is room for improvement and are looking into an attachment API that will address this.
- SilverRed 5y ago
  Can't you already attach arbitrary files as part of a tagged release? You can also direct link to any file you want which works the same as if it was uploaded. I'm not sure the file whitelist is adding any security here.

javier123454321 5y ago

But will they link Pull Requests to issues anytime soon?

alberth 5y ago

Question: how does the Table view headings reconcile to the Board view? On the Table view, there is a heading for: "Prototype", "Beta" and "Launch" https://github.githubassets.com/images/modules/site/planning-tracking/layout-table.png https://github.githubassets.com/images/modules/site/planning... But when you look at the Board view, I don't see "Prototype", "Beta" or "Launch" denoted anywhere on the card. https://github.githubassets.com/images/modules/site/planning-tracking/layout-board.png https://github.githubassets.com/images/modules/site/planning...

TGRHavoc 5y ago
By looks of it, they're milestones :)
- alberth 5y ago
  But how do the milestones get surfaced on the Board view?

bob1029 5y ago

Really looking forward to the boards & ability to split check boxes out into new tasks. Being able to decompose business issues into workable technical items has always been a challenge for us. The impedance of needing to create a new issue and copy stuff over from the big one would encourage us to not always do this.

FionnMc 5y ago

As a PM who recently moved our eng team from Jira to GitHub (it was a good move btw), this is amazing news! It solves so many of the little problems that GitHub issue caused us, really looking forward to using it!

sandGorgon 5y ago

if someone from github is looking at this, can u please include Gitlab's "Scoped Labels" in this - https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/labels.html#scoped-labels https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/labels.html#scoped-l... it seems that the new issues are going to operate on the basis of labels (as it should). Scoped/Nested labels are a godsend. For example, I can tag an issue with a label "UI::App::Android" and i should be able to filter on the basis of "UI::App" and get all issues. One of the things i still notice about the boards is that it is created on the basis of status. Gitlab's boards are created on milestones/status...or LABELS. https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/issue_board.html#organization-of-topics https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/issue_board.html#org... Most importantly, dragging tickets across boards will change the labels. This is far more powerful than just hardcoding them on statuses.

bostonsre 5y ago
Why not just tag it with separate labels? For that example, tag it with ui, app, and android. Then search with ui and app labels?
- coffeemug 5y ago
  For the same reason you ever need hierarchies-- without scoped labels you end up with a confusing soup of labels that's very difficult to make sense of. And the more labels you get, the harder everything becomes.
  - bostonsre 5y ago
    hrm.. I guess I could see that being useful in some cases. It might make discovery a little harder for someone that doesn't know the hierarchy, but I could see that being useful for people that know the hierarchy in an org that has a massive amount of stuff to label. I guess I just like key/value tags better than labels to organize and filter through data. They seem a little more self explanatory and I think they obviate the need of a hierarchy in the tag key naming.
  - jayd16 5y ago

jrochkind1 5y ago

> Automatically add issues to a project, That was the one thing I actually absolutely needed missing from current "Projects". Seems like such a simple basic thing, but the fact that I couldn't make it so a new issue created automatically showed up on a project board was a stopper for me.

aparsons 5y ago

I am NOT envious of Zenhub right now!

rawfan 5y ago

There is currently a move to disable issues (in opensource projects) and the driving factor behind this, is that other people can basically put stuff on your todo-list. What would be better: - make issues read-only for non-members - track problems in discussions. often they're not really bugs and other people can directly help. If not, I'll convert the discussion to an issue when appropriate. Benefit: bugs as discussions can be upvoted or downvoted so the community helps prioritizing.

Arnavion 5y ago
I haven't used Discussions, but why doesn't Issues already do what you're asking for? You don't have to consider every open issue as your TODO list; use one or more "Triaged" labels for that. And voting on issues already exists.
SilverRed 5y ago
I have not seen such a move in any of the projects I have looked at. Repo maintainers have either just allowed feature requests and ignore them but leave them there for either someone else to chip in on or just to show that it has already been requested. Or they will just close feature requests.
fergie 5y ago
I am pretty deep into open source, and have not done this myself, or seen this anywhere? Examples?
pyr0hu 5y ago
Yeah, but the issues page is NOT a todo-list.

dreamcompiler 5y ago

I don't use GitHub Issues [much] because I was under the impression that issues are not themselves stored as a git repo, but rather they are some kind of proprietary database GitHub maintains. Thus they create lockin for GitHub. Am I wrong about this?

Kaze404 5y ago
Yes. Issues are a Github feature, not a Git feature.
mynameisvlad 5y ago
I mean, isn't that the case for practically any issue tracking system? Which ones store their issue (and comments, etc) within the repo?
- Kaze404 5y ago
  Fossil! https://www.fossil-scm.org/ https://www.fossil-scm.org/
baby 5y ago
Why are you using Github if not for their social features?
- Lorin 5y ago
  Github's social/discovery features are too strong - it makes it difficult to justify keeping OS projects on GitLab even if the feature set is better for maintainers
- dreamcompiler 5y ago
  I can't tell if you're joking, but if not I use it because it's a reliable, free git server.
  - baby 5y ago
    Not sure why you’d think that. Maybe this is common in your circle but I don’t know anyone who uses github just to host a remote repo.

dboreham 5y ago

There's still nothing available today that's remotely as useful as Bugzilla, imho.

baby 5y ago

This is probably the slickest landing page I have seen in the last two years.

ed_blackburn 5y ago

What ever happened to Fogbugz?

c17r 5y ago
Still around, https://fogbugz.com/ https://fogbugz.com/ but owned by somebody other than Fog Creek.
- oblio 5y ago
  Fogbugz is Fog Creek :-)
  - c17r 5y ago
    FogBugz was renamed to Manuscript in 2017 and sold to DevFactory in 2018 who renamed it back to FogBugz. Fog Creek renamed themselves in 2018 to Glitch after their Glitch product.
shadytrees 5y ago
The lone and level sands stretch far away

fancy_pantser 5y ago

The UI, down to the content and styling of menus, looks a lot like Linear. I'm chuffed to see the best parts being borrowed, but it looks like they've made sub-tasks/issues too simple, as they aren't first-class issues, but mere checkboxes with short descriptions. https://linear.app https://linear.app

alkonaut 5y ago
On the other hand the “tasks are as heavyweight as the bugs or backlog items that spawned them” (often with just one task ie 1:1) creates a ton of overhead in e.g Azure Devops. Especially as efforts get spread out while rollup barely works. It’s also unclear whether PRs should be linked to tasks or the parent issue. I want more than a checkbox but less than an issue. A completion % and owner would be enough.
armandososa 5y ago
I often edit the description of an issue in linear just to breakdown the task using "markdown" checkboxes. In my mind: issues should correspond to a pull request and checkboxes to commits.

greatgib 5y ago

Omg, they did a copy of Asana. And not a copy of the good part, but a copy of the useless unergonomic eye candy parts ... And I hate so much Asana... It is so inefficient and frustrating to use. So, please, fire the designer that proposed this change before it can become mainstream. I don't understand the hype about the "board" thing. I guess that people think that they look cool and doing agile by using a board. But compare that to a normal table that you can reorder by columns based on your wishes...

HatchedLake721 5y ago
What view and UI you think would be the most efficient for this?

plasma 5y ago

I was hoping to see it mentioned that a collaborator can just be given issues permission (no code access), I’m assuming that’s still not possible?

thoughtpeddler 5y ago

Wow, there's a lot of Airtable in here. My team used GitHub Issues/Projects for a while, but ultimately moved to a custom Airtable solution for project management, release management, etc which gave us the tables, views, filters, groups, you name it. Seems like someone at GitHub got the notice about users wanting that more flexible UI/UX. Good on them!

dorian-graph 5y ago

Reminds me of https://height.app/ https://height.app/. I highly recommend giving it a go.

dancemethis 5y ago

Proprietary platform, quite an easy pass.

quicklime 5y ago

> Bored of boards? Switch to tables. I love this. I don’t know why the “agile board” became a thing. To me it always seemed like a poor way to visualize what is a list of items. My problem with agile boards is that they place tasks into separate columns to denote the task state, which often cuts off the task description (and can require a lot of horizontal scrolling). It also prevents using columns for other fields like the Assignee (as the table view in the new GitHub Issues does).

djrockstar1 5y ago
Yeah I think the design was made with an analog board in mind, where moving a task is easier than changing its state in place. But for a digital board tables definitely make more sense.
theptip 5y ago
My take on the background of why it became a thing: I think the idea with boards is that the (artificial) constraints of the medium are helpful in certain team configurations. As far as I'm aware, boards are most strongly advocated in Kanban, where there's a hard limit on WIP -- so having a board where you actually cannot have more than 10 items in your backlog before everything goes to hell is a feature not a bug. In Kanban, it's really important to be able to see at a glance, where your WIP is in the pipeline, e.g. you don't want to start a new task when there's a huge backlog of tasks waiting to be validated. In a table, you lose the ability to get a birds-eye view of the sprint status. Most teams aren't doing Kanban though -- so I think it's plausible that most teams will find a table view more usable/efficient.

fairpoints777 5y ago

Timing in this is perfect for us. Having yet another tool and custom apis or zapiers adds a lot of friction, we were going for I think zenhub but this will suffice

ageyfman 5y ago

they built notion boards into github. nice work! we've been using notion for our product work and it's been very flexible and powerful, but I do miss having the code and issues living together.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Xunjin 5y ago

Are you people still with status "on waiting". I'm looking forward to this.

aikinai 5y ago

In case the GitHub Issues team is still looking here, I have a request! Can you put the name of the commenter somewhere besides just the name field in the email from? Currently it's something like, Poster Name <notifications.github.com>, but that means you can't tell who the poster was from the email content itself. I use Apple Mail and have a contact for GitHub since that provides benefits like an avatar, easier search, etc, but now the contact clobbers the name field and I just see every email from "GitHub" with zero indication who wrote the comment.

quickthrower2 5y ago

Is there any info on how this would help with estimation and planning of a large number of tasks. E.g. "what can we get done this quarter?" I have an eye on https://www.openproject.org/ https://www.openproject.org/ because it seems to have these sort of features. I currently use Excel for this.

moralestapia 5y ago

Airtable is the most amazing thing that has happened to UI in years and it's really nice to see their ideas crawling on to other contexts like GitHub here.

minikomi 5y ago

I'll throw my random feature request in here since everyone else is: Ability to write github comments as org mode instead of markdown

arp242 5y ago
I wish it would just support "proper" Markdown where line breaks aren't treated as hard breaks. Makes it so much easier to copy stuff from Vim etc. I spend an inordinate amount of time J'ing lines together in Vim just to copy something to GitHub.

yukinon 5y ago

I'd like to be able to run reporting out of this so I can gather velocity metrics (for my boss) at the developer/project/milestone/arbitrary label level. It doesn't look like there are too options for this yet.

sudcha 5y ago

Oh me and everyone I know have been waiting for this. Why use any other Issue tracker if Github can do this itself? Countless integrations would be replaced by this. I wonder what would happen to all those dashboard / issue tracker / project tracking apps now.

softveda 5y ago

I am surprised no one has mentioned Asana.

WhyNotHugo 5y ago

I've mixed feelings. On one side, I like seeing something different to the crap that is Jira. Every single large company out there seems to use it and it's terrible. OTOH, not sure if I'm happy that the only new competition is a Microsoft product.