I strongly prefer Azure DevOps Boards for prodution quality project management, however, it’s very hard to beat gratis. For this reason, the Jakarta EE project is using GitHub Projects & Issues. As the release co-coordinator for Jakarta EE 11, I need to gain mastery of GitHub Projects & Issues. So, I set out to understand this 71 second long video. How hard can it be? It’s only one minute!

I am glad this video exists. I understand the producers get to claim, “look it’s so easy it fits in a one minute video.” However, either because the video moves too fast or I move too slowly (I am over fifty years old), it took me fifteen minutes of play/pause/think/repeat to fully absorb the content in a way that I could replicate the steps shown. Is there a video that just runs the full ten minutes and explains it to me rather than this Gen-Z play/pause/think/repeat approach?

In the absence of such a video, here is my second-by-second breakdown of this action packed video.

  • 00:04 an issue exists with a task list from some Investor-type persona.

  • 00:06 using the hover convert technique, convert the three tasks to issues.

  • 00:07 check the three checkboxes to close the newly created issues. (Why? Seems a waste of time. But it’s only one second, so I guess it doesn’t matter.)

  • 00:14 Create a new project.

  • 00:16 Type the octothorpe. (You’re not the only one who can be obtuse, defunkt.) This drops down a repository picker. There are probably some scope limitations here. Perhaps you can only pick repositories in the same Organization?

  • 00:17 Somehow more issues get added to a thing called The Plan, which I don’t recall being explicitly named. Also, the Investor wanted these to be called Epics but I don’t see that term anywhere.

  • 00:21 And now we have a giant flat unordered mess of about 25 issues with no hierarchical structure or organization. Also, there is a Status field, where are the valid values for that field defined? Is that automatic, like The Plan?

  • 00:23 Select (not click) the + icon to the right of the Assignees column. This looks like some crude form of categorization. Apparently you must define your schema for organizing your work on the fly. Apperently they invent the name Area. The Investor wanted these to be called Epics. They will not be happy with you using the wrong term.

    Anyhow, the video manually creates three Area values for the three Epics listed by the Investor. Somehow icons are present. Where do these come from?

  • 00:27 Select Apply. Somehow, magically, a new column appears. How is the ordering determined? How are the members for that column decided?

  • 00:31 Apparently the same process used for this Area column is used to create a Milestone column. Again, there are icons, but it’s not clear how they are chosen.

  • 00:33 Each column apparently has a dropdown. However, there appears to be a bug because the dropdown on the Milestone column has Area. But because the video moves so fast I guess it doesn’t matter. Anyhow, they use the Group by values item. This causes expand/collapse sections to appear for all the values of that column, with the member rows that have that value grouped together.

  • 00:41 Now we select the search area at the top of the table. It looks like they are demonstrating some kind of “filter” feature. Yes. They are. They are showing how you can make it so the table only shows issues belonging to the specified area.

  • 00:46 Now they use the drop down on the tab labeled The Plan and select Save changes to new view. This creates a new tab. Somehow a title is pre-filled as Game loop Backlog. Why does the word Backlog not appear in the first tab? Is there some convention over configuration thing happening here? The first tab is always called The Plan and the next one Backlog?

  • 00:50 Now we have another tab Standup. Where did that come from? I am guessing it came from using the same process to create the Game loop Backlog? But again, how does it know the tab should be called Standup? Anyhow, here we select the drop down on that tab and select Board.

  • 00:55 you get columns for the Status field. Again, where is the set of valid values for Status defined? How is it that the thing knows that the columns should correspond to the valid values of Status?

  • 0:56 - 01:11 We spend a luxurious fifteen seconds (20% of the total run time of the video) on a silly origami Octocat animation.