Customizing Board Pipelines

ZenHub Boards come with  seven default pipelines to start with: New Issues, Icebox, Backlog, Review/QA, In Progress, Done and Closed However since every team works differently, we offer various features to help get the Board customized to suit more unique workflows.

Renaming and deleting pipelines

Behind the cog icon on the top of the pipeline is the option to rename existing pipelines, or delete them.

Add new pipelines

As your team makes workflow changes, ZenHub makes it easy to focus on kaizen and keep your workflow flexible. Scroll to the far right of your Board to add a new pipeline.

You can move the pipelines on your Board by using drag and drop to ensure the order of the pipelines accurately reflects your workflow:

Pipeline Descriptions

Pipeline descriptions enable you and your team to effectively communicate what each pipeline means on the Board. Adding a description to each pipeline ensures you can communicate what your particular workflow means within your workspace. 

By adding a description to each pipeline, team members will have a clear understanding of what Issues belong in which pipeline allowing for a clear and consistent flow of Issues across the Board.

Benefits of pipeline descriptions

Here are a few ways pipeline descriptions helps teams:

• Provides teams with an effective way to communicate what each pipeline means within their workflow
• Ensures there is a consistent usage of pipelines which improves Board hygiene 
• Eliminates the need for an external tool to communicate how your team collaborates together

Creating and using pipeline descriptions

All new Workspaces that are created will have six default pipeline descriptions to match our default pipeline stages. While these default descriptions are a great starting point for any project, they should be customized and changed to suit your teams workflow:

Here's an overview of the pipeline descriptions provided:

Pipeline	Pipeline description
New Issues	Newly created Issues land here automatically.
Icebox	Low priority, un-prioritized Issues that are not immediate priorities.
Backlog	Upcoming Issues that are immediate priorities. Issues here should be prioritized top-to-bottom in the pipeline.
In Progress	What the team is currently working on, ordered by priority.
Review Q/A	Issues open to the team for review and testing. Usually this means the code is ready to be deployed pending feedback.
Done	Issues that are tested and ready to be deployed to production.

Updating new pipelines or empty pipelines

For empty pipelines with no description, a + will be show next to the i icon next to the pipeline name. You can select this to add a description to the pipeline. 

You can also select the Add description + shown in pipelines with empty states.

 It's important to communicate what type of Issues should land in pipelines when adding descriptions. Each member of the team should have a clear understanding of how Issues are supposed to flow across pipelines.

Viewing and editing pipeline descriptions

To view an existing pipeline description, hover over the i icon next to the pipeline name. This will display a tooltip with the pipeline description:

Updating existing pipelines

To edit and customize existing pipeline descriptions, select the pipeline options cog where you can choose Edit name and description. From here you will be able to edit the pipeline name and description or return the pipeline to an empty state.

Useful information on pipeline descriptions

• If you edit a pipeline description in a multi-repo Board, the description will be the same for all connected repos as the pipelines are the same.
• Pipeline descriptions are not mandatory, these can be deleted at anytime and returned to an empty state. However, these are a great way to communicate to your team where Issues should be placed based on your workflow and we highly encourage your team to set these up or help organize your work.

For more information, see: Setting up your first ZenHub Workspace