GitLab Product Planning, 19 Oct 2022

Previous Meeting

⏯

youtube image

►

From YouTube: Use GitLab's issue health status to power your workflow

Description

Read more about using health status on issues:
https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/issues/managing_issues.html#health-status

A

Hello, I'm, Amanda, varida and I am the senior product manager with product planning and I want to show you how you can utilize issue health status to power, your workflow, so first things. First, what is health status? It's a field on the issue that allows you to display whether the issue is on track, needs attention or is at risk.

A

This allows you to track track the risk in meeting your plans signal to others in an asynchronous fashion, the status of the issue, and it allows you to incorporate this status into other daily and routine workflows, which I'm going to show you some examples of next.

A

So this is an example of an issues list a very useful tool because it's super flexible. It allows you to slice and dice the issues um using the filters here, I'm demonstrating just the filtered list um by the Milestone start date or the the current Milestone, and just in this view it's already very useful, because I can see at a glance the health status in these labels. Here it needs attention at risk. So it's very easy to see the status of what's going on in the current Milestone.

A

I could even slice this even further by assigning by a label and I could get very concise information and include that health status.

A

Also in the issues list, I can bulk edit the issues to assign health status. So in this case, let's imagine it's the beginning of the Milestone and I have a few issues that need health status assigned I can filter for the Milestone that started. Health status is null and bulk assign on track to these issues, because the issues May roll up to an epic and sub epics, we can pass that health status all the way up into the Epic view as well.

A

So here we have the the very parent project, which is the parent, epic and I can see quickly. There are two issues at risk and I can quickly drill down into the sub epic, because I can see that those are contained in this sub. Epic I can then drill down further to see the specific issues which are at risk and then I can reach out to the person assigned to them and find out what the problem is.

A

This is a really nice view for um the stakeholders for executives and for folks who aren't in the day-to-day issues to be able to see how a project is tracking I, really like issue boards as a product manager, because I can see all of the work.

A

That's in progress for the Milestone by different labels like workflow or other things, and in this view I can very quickly see what the status is in each of these lists, I can also filter down to say you know what just show me, those that are at risk or just show me those that need attention, which is a very powerful um and efficient way to find out how things are going without having to Ping somebody and disrupt their day.

A

This view is especially nice for engineering managers, because they could have a view by assignee, for example, and quickly see how things are tracking for the current milestone um in this case. I see that this top issue is on track, but it is blocking these two which are set to needs attention, and so, since the blocking issue is on track, maybe I don't reach out, because I expect that the needs attention issues will resolve as long as the blocking issue stays on track.

A

But you can see how um this health status in the board view, can be useful for more than one role: the product manager, the en the designer. What have you okay? Lastly, I want to chat with you about um how we can enable health status here in gitlab internally and dog food it in a more automated fashion. So so far, I've showed you how to set it manually, but we've just recently implemented um triagevat uh a policy entry ajbot which will automatically set the value for you if you choose to so.

A

Why are we doing this? It's because it's going to allow us this asynchronous process to raise availability, visibility of the status or risk of an issue, and so how does it so? The first step is: um you must apply the label track health status two-year issues. If you want the bot to automatically do this for you, um what is it doing so it's um if the issue doesn't have an assignee by the sixth and in the current Milestone, it will set the status to need detention by the 14th.

A

If there's still no assignee, it will update you at risk and if the issue is open, but without the workflow label in review or verification after the 14th, it will also set at risk.

A

So I want to note that um if you are using the triage bot policy on your issues- and you manually set the health status on an issue, the triage bot will ignore it. So it allows the manual overrides to take precedence.

A

I also want to mention that the rules are super flexible. Although these are Global rules, you are allowed to go into the file that drives um this data and or this policy rather and modify it for your teams. If you think there's something that you would um like to see and all of the teams would benefit from, it feel free to implement it and just communicate.

A

If you want something specific to your team you're more than welcome to create a custom section of the policy for your group, using um like group labels, for example, currently I want to note that the bot runs twice a month, but we are soon um going to update this job to run daily.

A

Okay, I just wanted to tease a little bit here. We have a couple of things in um our current Milestone, our next Milestone, and that is being able to edit the status of the the I'm. Sorry edit. The health status in the board view on the right pane um being able to sort the issue list by health status, so ascending or descending by the the health status.

A

um I already mentioned that we're updating the triage bot to run daily and I'd like to ask you for feedback if you'd like to participate in dog fooding this feature, and you can give us feedback on both the health status as well as the house. The health status triage bot policy um I would love to learn more about how you're using it how you envision. We could use it in the future so that we could make this feature more valuable to our customers thanks. So much for watching have a great rest of your day.