Welcome to Zenhub! To ensure you hit the ground running, let's take a look at creating your very first team Workspace so that you can collaborate with your team and ship better software!
Course Outline | |
| Skill | To be completed |
| - Name a team Workspace | ✅ |
| - Connect one or multiple repositories to your Workspace | ✅ |
| - Set a default repository for your Workspace | ✅ |
| - Connect team Workspaces using automated Workflows | ✅ |
A Workspace is how your team will keep GitHub issues organized using Zenhub. You can add any number of GitHub repos into the same Zenhub Workspace, letting your team benefit from a shared view on all your work. Workspaces are inspired by kanban boards and present a simple yet incredibly robust picture of your software projects. They allow you to track GitHub issues and pull requests end-to-end through the release cycle. Having issues turned on is a feature setting within the GitHub rethat will need to be enabled.
As the same GitHub repositories can be added to multiple Boards, Workspaces allow individual teams to work on the same set of issues but follow their own workflow and pipeline structure. When setting up your Workspaces in Zenhub we encourage all teams big and small to think about the hand-offs, stakeholders, and collaborators within their ecosystem and leverage Workflows to surface the big picture. The first step is to think about your team's use case and the types of hand-offs, or transitions that typically take place.
When viewing an issue belonging to multiple Workspaces, you can easily view how it is progressing in each Workspace pipeline it belongs to.
Don't worry—When you create a new Workspace, it won't affect repos or Issue placement in existing Workspaces. Learn more about how your team can use Workspaces!
Creating your first Workspace
Let's get your first Workspace set up so that it looks and feels like home for you and your team! You can create a Workspace in either the Zenhub web app or the Zenhub extension.
Web app: When navigating in Zenhub, you can create a Workspace at any time through the Create new Workspace button on the Workspace navigator:
Zenhub Extension: Alternatively, you can create your first Workspace directly within GitHub. To do this, make sure you have installed the Zenhub extension on Chrome or Firefox. You can then navigate to the Zenhub tab from within one of your GitHub repositories. From here you will be prompted to create a Workspace
You can then give your Workspace a name and a description!
Workspace names have to be unique within Zenhub. No two Zenhub Workspaces can be named the same. Names are searched independent of case—If you name one Workspace Design and attempt to name a second design, you'll be prompted to create a unique name.
Once you have added a name and description for your Workspace you can then add any repositories you would like to be part of this Workspace. You can add multiple repositories to the Workspace by selecting the Add a repo + option.
Using the avatar on the bottom left of the modal, you can toggle across all organizations and personal repositories that you have access to. If the repository you'd like to add is in another one of your GitHub organizations, you can connect this using the custom link on the bottom left, where the avatar for your organization is located:
Once you've selected the repositories you want in your Workspace, be sure to set a default. This default is where new Issues will be created and is a custom setting that every individual can set. The default setting applies only to you when you create new Issues.
Once you are happy with the repositories you'd like to connect with, click Create new Workspace.
Import a GitHub Project when setting up your Workspace
Looking to move away from GitHub Projects and into Zenhub? You can import existing GitHub Projects automatically in seconds. This allows you to take advantage of all the features Zenhub adds including a full reporting suite, roadmapping, automated sprint planning, planning poker, epics, multi-select and more. Check out our YouTube tutorial to get started:
Use Automated Workflows to connect team Workspaces
Once you've created your teams' Workspace, we recommend setting up Workflows between team Workspaces.
Automated Workflows allow pipelines in different Workspaces to be synchronized to automate hand-offs from one team to the next. This allows each individual team to continue working through their unique workflow while communicating their progress to a collective team Workspace.
We see teams use Workflows for many different use-cases including :
- Hand off's between different teams - Engineering teams can eliminate manual hand-offs with QA teams by setting up Workflows. For example, when an issue moves to the In Review pipeline in the Front-end teams workspace, a workflow trigger will automatically move the Issue to Ready for testing in the QA Workspace signaling the issue is ready to be worked on:
- Surfacing the big picture - Team leaders and managers can create their own view that is always up to date, reflecting the progress of individual teams in a single view. By separating each team into their own pipelines (see image below), stakeholders now have an automated view of everything happening across their development teams:
