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Tools for Managing Issues

Based on Intro to GitHub (GO-Centric) with credit to Nomi Harris and Chris Mungall

Labels

Labels are a useful tool to help group and organize issues, allowing people to filter issues by grouping. Note: Only project contributors can add/change labels

Best Practices for Labels

  • Make use of use GitHub's default labels: bug, question, enhancement, good first issue, etc.
  • Define new labels as needed for project management
  • Lightly coordinate labels across repos in an organization
  • Labels are not ontologies; don’t overload them. A small simple set consistently applied is better than overly specific inconsistently applied labels

Superissues

Superissues are issues that have checklists (added using -[] on items). These are useful as they show progress towards completion. These can be used for issues that require multiple steps to solve.

Milestones

Milestones are used for issues with a specific date/deadline. Milestones contain issues and issues can be filtered by milestones. They are also useful for visualizing how many issues in it is completed.

Project Boards

Project boards are a useful tool to organise, as the name implies, projects. They can span multiple repos (though the repos need to be in the same organisation). Notes can also be added.