Planning next to your code – GitHub Projects is now generally available

At GitHub, we strive to help developers do the best work of their lives. From helping easily secure projects with Dependabot to enabling faster coding with GitHub Copilot, our mission is to facilitate an unsurpassed developer experience. I love working for a company where every single day, we lace up our running shoes and add some cayenne pepper to our coffee so that we can smash the ball out of the park for developers across the globe.

Planning and tracking is at the heart of how great development teams operate and essential to developer velocity. As teams and projects grow, how we work evolves. Tools that hard-code a specific methodology are too specific and rigid to flex to whatever the moment demands. Often, we find ourselves creating a spreadsheet or pulling out a notepad just to have the space to think. But then our planning is disconnected from where development happens and quickly goes stale.

The new GitHub Projects connects your planning directly to the work your teams are doing in GitHub and flexibly adapts to whatever your team needs at any point. Built like a spreadsheet, project tables give you 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.

Today, we are announcing the general availability of the new and improved Projects powered by GitHub Issues. Since we launched the public beta last year, we have listened to your feedback and shipped 15 changelogs every two to three weeks.

A lap around

With this launch, you can get more out of the GitHub Projects tables, boards, automation, and charts. Let’s walk through them.

Tables and boards—a point of view: For your planning tool to fit you like a glove, you need to be able to look at data from different perspectives. The new GitHub Projects allows you to group and pivot your issues by stage, priority, status, assignee, or any custom field.

Your data, your way: It would be presumptuous to assume all work across 83 million developers requires the same metadata set. With GitHub Projects you can define priorities, labels, assignees, OKRs, reviewers, QA stages, and countless other concepts with a type system that adapts to your process and workflows. Focus on the actual work, not the bookkeeping.

Quick charts for great insights: Helpful charts can make data a piece of cake to understand and use. Configure and track cycle velocity, current work status, and complex visualizations like cumulative flow diagrams.

Put robots in charge of the busy work: Software teams no longer have to spend hours updating issues, keeping spreadsheets up-to-date, and generating status reports. With built-in workflows and robust APIs, you can enlist robots to automate as much of the process as possible so that you can focus on the critical items.

What’s next

A product like GitHub Projects will always be evolving. We are committed to continuing our tempo of frequent updates to our users. Over the next two quarters, our focus will shift towards continuous improvement of the day-to-day scenarios plus delivering the following roadmap features:

• Dependencies and relationships. You need richer 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. At GitHub, scriptability is a key primitive. New automation capabilities will provide custom triggers, conditionals, and action logic to adapt the project to your 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.
• A GitHub Mobile experience. Get access to Projects untethered from your desktop. Open and work with Issues and Projects from anywhere and anytime.

Get started with GitHub Projects today

If you’re interested in learning more or giving us feedback, check out these links:

• Our latest ships (we’re always improving!)
• GitHub Issues Docs (check out the quickstart guide!)
• Where to give us feedback
• What’s coming on the roadmap

The new GitHub Projects are already included in GitHub Issues for existing Free, Team, and Enterprise (Cloud) customers.

Written by

Mario Rodriguez

@mariorod