Announced in beta at GitHub Universe 2021, GitHub Projects is now generally available, including new features for issue grouping and pivoting, metadata customization, charting, and improved automation.
GitHub Projects provides a tabular view of issues and pull requests defined in a repository to make it easier to plan and track development progress.Issues and PRs can be easily filtered, sorted, and grouped based on a set of standard fields as well as custom fields you create to adapt the tool to your process.
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.
As mentioned, GitHub has been extending Projects in several ways since it launched in beta last year. Specifically, Projects enables defining custom metadata fields associated to issues, including text, number, date, iteration, and single select. Additionally, issues can be organized by date using flexible date ranges to better adjust to sprints, cycles, and roadmap duration.
Completely new is the possibility of creating and customizing charts, such as bar, column, line, and stacked-area charts, which can be persisted and shared using an URL.
In this GA release, GitHub Projects also attempts to address some of the criticism it received when the beta started, specifically the impossibility of automatically add issues to a project, by extending the integration between Projects and Actions.
On the automation front, it is also worth mentioning that GitHub Projects got a new GraphQL API, dubbed V2, which also includes support for Webhooks to subscribe to events taking place in your project, such as editing an item.
GitHub says they will continue to extend Projects capabilities by focusing on improving the day-to-day scenario and adding a number of new features, including handling dependencies and relationships between issues and projects; new triggers, conditionals, and action logic to improve scriptability and automation; a new timeline layout alongside the tabular view and the classic Kanban board; and an improved mobile experience.
