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Issue Boards (FREE)

The GitLab Issue Board is a software project management tool used to plan, organize, and visualize a workflow for a feature or product release. It can be used as a Kanban or a Scrum board.

It pairs issue tracking and project management, keeping everything together, so that you don't need to jump between different platforms to organize your workflow.

Issue boards build on the existing issue tracking functionality and labels. Your issues appear as cards in vertical lists, organized by their assigned labels, milestones, or assignees.

Issue boards help you to visualize and manage your entire process in GitLab. You add your labels, and then create the corresponding list for your existing issues. When you're ready, you can drag your issue cards from one step to another one.

An issue board can show you the issues your team is working on, who is assigned to each, and where the issues are in the workflow.

To let your team members organize their own workflows, use multiple issue boards. This allows creating multiple issue boards in the same project.

Different issue board features are available in different GitLab tiers, as shown in the following table:

Tier	Number of project issue boards	Number of group issue boards	Configurable issue boards	Assignee lists
Free	Multiple	1	No	No
Premium	Multiple	Multiple	Yes	Yes
Ultimate	Multiple	Multiple	Yes	Yes

To learn more, visit GitLab Enterprise features for issue boards below.

Watch a video presentation of the Issue Board feature.

Multiple issue boards

Multiple issue boards per project moved to GitLab Free in 12.1.

Multiple issue boards per group are available in GitLab Premium.

Multiple issue boards allow for more than one issue board for a given project (FREE) or group (PREMIUM). This is great for large projects with more than one team or when a repository hosts the code of multiple products.

Using the search box at the top of the menu, you can filter the listed boards.

When you have ten or more boards available, a Recent section is also shown in the menu, with shortcuts to your last four visited boards.

When you're revisiting an issue board in a project or group with multiple boards, GitLab automatically loads the last board you visited.

Create an issue board

To create a new issue board:

Click the dropdown with the current board name in the upper left corner of the Issue Boards page.
Click Create new board.
Enter the new board's name and select its scope: milestone, labels, assignee, or weight.

Delete an issue board

To delete the currently active issue board:

Click the dropdown with the current board name in the upper left corner of the Issue Boards page.
Click Delete board.
Click Delete to confirm.

Issue boards use cases

You can tailor GitLab issue boards to your own preferred workflow. Here are some common use cases for issue boards.

For examples of using issue boards along with epics (PREMIUM), issue health status (ULTIMATE), and scoped labels (PREMIUM) for various Agile frameworks, check:

The How to use GitLab for Agile portfolio planning and project management blog post (November 2020)
Cross-project Agile work management with GitLab (15 min, July 2020)

Use cases for a single issue board

With the GitLab Workflow you can discuss proposals in issues, label them, and organize and prioritize them with issue boards.

For example, let's consider this simplified development workflow:

You have a repository that hosts your application's codebase, and your team actively contributes code.
Your backend team starts working on a new implementation, gathers feedback and approval, and passes it over to the frontend team.
When frontend is complete, the new feature is deployed to a staging environment to be tested.
When successful, it's deployed to production.

If you have the labels Backend, Frontend, Staging, and Production, and an issue board with a list for each, you can:

Visualize the entire flow of implementations since the beginning of the development life cycle until deployed to production.
Prioritize the issues in a list by moving them vertically.
Move issues between lists to organize them according to the labels you've set.
Add multiple issues to lists in the board by selecting one or more existing issues.

Use cases for multiple issue boards

With multiple issue boards, each team can have their own board to organize their workflow individually.

Scrum team

With multiple issue boards, each team has one board. Now you can move issues through each part of the process. For instance: To Do, Doing, and Done.

Organization of topics

Create lists to order issues by topic and quickly change them between topics or groups, such as between UX, Frontend, and Backend. The changes are reflected across boards, as changing lists updates the labels on each issue accordingly.

Advanced team handover

For example, suppose we have a UX team with an issue board that contains:

To Do
Doing
Frontend

When finished with something, they move the card to Frontend. The Frontend team's board looks like:

Frontend
Doing
Done

Cards finished by the UX team automatically appear in the Frontend column when they are ready for them.

NOTE: For a broader use case, please see the blog post GitLab Workflow, an Overview. For a real use case example, you can read why Codepen decided to adopt issue boards to improve their workflow with multiple boards.

Quick assignments

To quickly assign issues to your team members:

Create assignee lists for each team member.
Drag an issue onto the team member's list.

Issue board terminology

An issue board represents a unique view of your issues. It can have multiple lists with each list consisting of issues represented by cards.

A list is a column on the issue board that displays issues matching certain attributes. In addition to the default "Open" and "Closed" lists, each additional list shows issues matching your chosen label, assignee, or milestone. On the top of each list you can see the number of issues that belong to it. Types of lists include:

Open (default): all open issues that do not belong to one of the other lists. Always appears as the leftmost list.
Closed (default): all closed issues. Always appears as the rightmost list.
Label list: all open issues for a label.
Assignee list: all open issues assigned to a user.
Milestone list: all open issues for a milestone.

A Card is a box on a list, and it represents an issue. You can drag cards from one list to another to change their label, assignee, or milestone. The information you can see on a card includes:

Issue title
Associated labels
Issue number
Assignee

Permissions

Users with the Reporter and higher roles can use all the functionality of the Issue Board feature to create or delete lists. They can also drag issues from one list to another.

How GitLab orders issues in a list

When visiting a board, issues appear ordered in any list. You're able to change that order by dragging the issues. The changed order is saved, so that anybody who visits the same board later sees the reordering, with some exceptions.

The first time a given issue appears in any board (that is, the first time a user loads a board containing that issue), it is ordered in relation to other issues in that list. The order is done according to label priority.

At this point, that issue is assigned a relative order value by the system, with respect to the other issues in the list. Any time you drag and reorder the issue, its relative order value changes accordingly.

Also, any time that issue appears in any board, the ordering is done according to the updated relative order value. It's only the first time an issue appears that it takes from the priority order mentioned above. If a user in your GitLab instance drags issue A above issue B, the ordering is maintained when these two issues are subsequently loaded in any board in the same instance. This could be a different project board or a different group board, for example.

This ordering also affects issue lists. Changing the order in an issue board changes the ordering in an issue list, and vice versa.

GitLab Enterprise features for issue boards

GitLab issue boards are available on the GitLab Free tier, but some advanced functionality is present in higher tiers only.

Configurable issue boards (PREMIUM)

Setting current iteration as scope introduced in GitLab 13.8.

Moved to GitLab Premium in 13.9.

An issue board can be associated with a milestone, labels, assignee, weight, and current iteration, which automatically filter the board issues accordingly. This allows you to create unique boards according to your team's need.

You can define the scope of your board when creating it or by clicking the Edit board button. After a milestone, iteration, assignee, or weight is assigned to an issue board, you can no longer filter through these in the search bar. In order to do that, you need to remove the desired scope (for example, milestone, assignee, or weight) from the issue board.

If you don't have editing permission in a board, you're still able to see the configuration by clicking View scope.

Watch a video presentation of the Configurable Issue Board feature.

Focus mode

Moved to GitLab Free SaaS in 12.10.

Moved to GitLab Free self-managed in 13.0.

To enable or disable focus mode, select the Toggle focus mode button ({maximize}) at the top right. In focus mode, the navigation UI is hidden, allowing you to focus on issues in the board.

Sum of issue weights (PREMIUM)

Moved to GitLab Premium in 13.9.

The top of each list indicates the sum of issue weights for the issues that belong to that list. This is useful when using boards for capacity allocation, especially in combination with assignee lists.

Group issue boards (PREMIUM)

Accessible at the group navigation level, a group issue board offers the same features as a project-level board. It can display issues from all projects in that group and its descendant subgroups. Similarly, you can only filter by group labels for these boards. When updating milestones and labels for an issue through the sidebar update mechanism, again only group-level objects are available.

Assignee lists (PREMIUM)

Introduced in GitLab Premium 11.0.

As in a regular list showing all issues with a chosen label, you can add an assignee list that shows all issues assigned to a user. You can have a board with both label lists and assignee lists. To add an assignee list:

Select the Add list dropdown button.
Select the Assignee list tab.
Search and select the user you want to add as an assignee.

Now that the assignee list is added, you can assign or unassign issues to that user by dragging issues to and from an assignee list. To remove an assignee list, just as with a label list, click the trash icon.

Milestone lists (PREMIUM)

Introduced in GitLab Premium 11.2.

You're also able to create lists of a milestone. These are lists that filter issues by the assigned milestone, giving you more freedom and visibility on the issue board. To add a milestone list:

Select the Add list dropdown button.
Select the Milestone tab.
Search and click the milestone.

Like the assignee lists, you're able to drag issues to and from a milestone list to manipulate the milestone of the dragged issues. As in other list types, click the trash icon to remove a list.

Group issues in swimlanes (PREMIUM)

Grouping by epic introduced in GitLab Premium 13.6.

Editing issue titles in the issue sidebar introduced in GitLab 13.8.

With swimlanes you can visualize issues grouped by epic. Your issue board keeps all the other features, but with a different visual organization of issues. This feature is available both at the project and group level.

For a video overview, see Epics Swimlanes Walkthrough - 13.6 (November 2020).

To group issues by epic in an issue board:

Select the Group by dropdown button.
Select Epic.

To edit an issue without leaving this view, select the issue card (not its title), and a sidebar appears on the right. There you can see and edit the issue's:

Title
Assignees
Epic PREMIUM
Milestone
Time tracking value (view only)
Due date
Labels
Weight
Notifications setting

You can also drag issues to change their position and epic assignment:

To reorder an issue, drag it to the new position within a list.
To assign an issue to another epic, drag it to the epic's horizontal lane.
To unassign an issue from an epic, drag it to the Issues with no epic assigned lane.
To move an issue to another epic and another list, at the same time, drag the issue diagonally.

Work In Progress limits (PREMIUM)

Introduced in GitLab 12.7

Moved to GitLab Premium in 13.9.

You can set a Work In Progress (WIP) limit for each issue list on an issue board. When a limit is set, the list's header shows the number of issues in the list and the soft limit of issues. You cannot set a WIP limit on the default lists (Open and Closed).

Examples:

When you have a list with four issues and a limit of five, the header shows 4/5. If you exceed the limit, the current number of issues is shown in red.
You have a list with five issues with a limit of five. When you move another issue to that list, the list's header displays 6/5, with the six shown in red.

To set a WIP limit for a list:

Navigate to a Project or Group board of which you're a member.
Click the settings icon in a list's header.
Next to Work In Progress Limit, click Edit.
Enter the maximum number of issues.
Press Enter to save.

Blocked issues

Introduced in GitLab 12.8.

If an issue is blocked by another issue, an icon appears next to its title to indicate its blocked status.

Actions you can take on an issue board

Create a new list.
Remove an existing list.
Add issues to a list.
Remove an issue from a list.
Filter issues that appear across your issue board.
Create workflows.
Drag issues between lists.
Multi-select issue cards.
Drag and reorder the lists.
Change issue labels (by dragging an issue between lists).
Close an issue (by dragging it to the Done list).

If you're not able to do some of the things above, make sure you have the right permissions.

Create a new list

Create a new list by clicking the Add list dropdown button in the upper right corner of the issue board.

Then, choose the label or user to base the new list on. The new list is inserted at the end of the lists, before Done. To move and reorder lists, drag them around.

To create a list for a label that doesn't yet exist, create the label by choosing Create project label or Create group label. This creates the label immediately and adds it to the dropdown. You can now choose it to create a list.

Remove a list

Removing a list doesn't have any effect on issues and labels, as it's just the list view that's removed. You can always restore it later if you need.

To remove a list from an issue board:

Select the List settings icon ({settings}) on the top of the list you want to remove. The list settings sidebar opens on the right.
Select Remove list. A confirmation dialog appears.
Select OK.

Add issues to a list (FREE SELF)

Feature flag introduced in GitLab 13.7.

It's deployed behind a feature flag, disabled by default.

It's disabled on GitLab.com.

It's recommended for production use.

To use it in GitLab self-managed instances, ask a GitLab administrator to enable it. (FREE SELF)

You can add issues to a list in a project issue board by clicking the Add issues button in the top right corner of the issue board. This opens up a modal window where you can see all the issues that do not belong to any list.

Select one or more issues by clicking the cards and then click Add issues to add them to the selected list. You can limit the issues you want to add to the list by filtering by the following:

Assignee
Author
Epic
Iteration (introduced in GitLab 13.6)
Label
Milestone
My Reaction
Release
Weight

Enable or disable adding issues to the list (FREE SELF)

Adding issues to the list is deployed behind a feature flag that is disabled by default. GitLab administrators with access to the GitLab Rails console can enable it.

To enable it:

Feature.enable(:add_issues_button)

To disable it:

Feature.disable(:add_issues_button)

Remove an issue from a list

Removing an issue from a list can be done by clicking the issue card and then clicking the Remove from board button in the sidebar. The respective label is removed.

Filter issues

You should be able to use the filters on top of your issue board to show only the results you want. It's similar to the filtering used in the issue tracker, as the metadata from the issues and labels is re-used in the issue board.

You can filter by the following:

Assignee
Author
Epic
Iteration (introduced in GitLab 13.6)
Label
Milestone
My Reaction
Release
Weight

Create workflows

By reordering your lists, you can create workflows. As lists in issue boards are based on labels, it works out of the box with your existing issues.

So if you've already labeled things with Backend and Frontend, the issue appears in the lists as you create them. In addition, this means you can move something between lists by changing a label.

A typical workflow of using an issue board would be:

You have created and prioritized labels to categorize your issues.
You have a bunch of issues (ideally labeled).
You visit the issue board and start creating lists to create a workflow.
You move issues around in lists so that your team knows who should be working on what issue.
When the work by one team is done, the issue can be dragged to the next list so someone else can pick it up.
When the issue is finally resolved, the issue is moved to the Done list and gets automatically closed.

For example, you can create a list based on the label of Frontend and one for Backend. A designer can start working on an issue by adding it to the Frontend list. That way, everyone knows that this issue is now being worked on by the designers.

Then, when they're done, all they have to do is drag it to the next list, Backend. Then, a backend developer can eventually pick it up. When they’re done, they move it to Done, to close the issue.

This process can be seen clearly when visiting an issue. With every move to another list, the label changes and a system note is recorded.

Drag issues between lists

When dragging issues between lists, different behavior occurs depending on the source list and the target list.

	To Open	To Closed	To label `B` list	To assignee `Bob` list
From Open	-	Issue closed	`B` added	`Bob` assigned
From Closed	Issue reopened	-	Issue reopened `B` added	Issue reopened `Bob` assigned
From label `A` list	`A` removed	Issue closed	`A` removed `B` added	`Bob` assigned
From assignee `Alice` list	`Alice` unassigned	Issue closed	`B` added	`Alice` unassigned `Bob` assigned

Multi-select issue cards

Introduced in GitLab 12.4.

You can select multiple issue cards, then drag the group to another position within the list, or to another list. This makes it faster to reorder many issues at once.

To select and move multiple cards:

Select each card with Control+Click on Windows or Linux, or Command+Click on MacOS.
Drag one of the selected cards to another position or list and all selected cards are moved.

First time using an issue board

The automatic creation of the To Do and Doing lists introduced in GitLab 13.5.

Deprecated in GitLab 13.7. In GitLab 13.7 and later, the To Do and Doing columns are not automatically created.

WARNING: This feature was deprecated in GitLab 13.7. The To Do and Doing columns are no longer automatically created.

In GitLab 13.5 and 13.6, the first time you open an issue board, you are presented with the default lists (Open, To Do, Doing, and Closed).

If the To Do and Doing labels don't exist in the project or group, they are created, and their lists appear as empty. If any of them already exists, the list is filled with the issues that have that label.

Tips

A few things to remember:

Moving an issue between lists removes the label from the list it came from and adds the label from the list it goes to.
An issue can exist in multiple lists if it has more than one label.
Lists are populated with issues automatically if the issues are labeled.
Clicking the issue title inside a card takes you to that issue.
Clicking a label inside a card quickly filters the entire issue board and show only the issues from all lists that have that label.
For performance and visibility reasons, each list shows the first 20 issues by default. If you have more than 20 issues, start scrolling down and the next 20 appear.

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