How to create a board with GitHub Issues

Kanban boards are a great way to visualize project progress. Jack Wallen shows you how to add a kanban-like board in GitHub Issues.

GitHub Issues allows you to track the work you do within GitHub. It’s a great way to keep all of your work in sync and track the progress of your software projects. You can link issues to pull requests and won’t have to navigate away from the platform to keep track of your work. GitHub Issues is a part of every GitHub repository and makes it easy to keep track of all of the issues associated with your code.

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Even better, you can create a kanban-like board for GitHub Issues to make it even easier to follow and manage the issues for your project. You’ll be able to quickly see where each bug and feature request is in the workflow, for an at-a-glance overview.

I want to show you how to create a kanban-like board on your GitHub Issues project. It’s easy to do, and if you’re a fan of kanban, it’ll make your project management job a bit easier.

With that said, let’s get to the business of creating a board for your GitHub Issues project.

What you’ll need to create a board on GitHub Issues

The only things you’ll need for this are a valid GitHub account and a repository housing your project. That’s it. Let’s get to work.

How to add a board view to a new project in GitHub Issues

The first thing to do is log in to your GitHub account. Once on your account page, you should see the Project tab near the top (Figure A).

Figure A

Click Projects. If you haven’t already created a project, you’ll need to click New Project, select Board from the pop-up (Figure B) and then click Create.

Figure B

This will create an empty project board in GitHub (Figure C) where you can begin adding cards for issues, feature requests and more.

Figure C

How to add a board view to an existing project in GitHub Issues

But, what if you already have a project created in Issues? How do you add a board to it? That’s just as easy. To add a board to a project, navigate to that project, and click New View. This will automatically add a new view in the default table layout. If you click the downward-pointing arrow in the new tab, a pop-up will appear, where you can switch the view from Table to Board (Figure D). Click Board, and the view will immediately change to a Board.

Figure D

Once you have your Board view, you can then customize things like the column names, add more columns, rename the view, change the column field, and much more. You configure much of the board from the tab dropdown. Just make sure you click Save Changes (Figure E) if you do make any changes.

Figure E

And that’s all there is to adding a kanban-like board to GitHub Issues. If you’re looking for the easiest way to manage your projects, you cannot beat kanban boards for their simplicity and ease of use. Give this a try, and see if Boards don’t become your default view in GitHub Issues.

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