Day 50 trillion of begging Github for a functional notification system so I can stop receiving infinite numbers of emails from all the bots and similar things commenting on PRs. Also being designated a codeowner in a large repo, the number of notifications I get daily from the number of PRs is fucking absurd, with no way of turning them off. Drives me up the wall daily. If a colleague doesn't straight up send me a PR…
GitHub introduces sub-issues, issue types and advanced search
191–200 of 213 posts
Re: GitHub introduces sub-issues, issue types and advanced search
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like ticketing is something that has been pasted on for corporate reasons. Keeping track of the work to be done doesn't require a ticketing system, anyone remember using Story Cards? A whiteboard?
Well, if they wanted to implement keeping track of work to be done , they'd have long ago implemented subissues, sub-subissues, and sub^n-issues , because obviously work does not break down into a list, or a one-level-deep tree - the natural data structure for breaking down work is a directed graph (and if you really must do an 80/20 on it, then a tree ). Sadly, to this day, out of popular software packages used in s…
In the agile world it's accepted that a task that today looks like it depends on another task may not have that dependency next week. Planning involves scheduling what the stakeholders prioritize now that can be done, and whatever lands in the "we can't do that until we do other thing" doesn't even get scheduled.
Re: GitHub introduces sub-issues, issue types and advanced search
#193I am not sure if I am going to like this feature. I miss the simplicity. Guess those times re over.
GitHub is free for most people, so they are only beholden to large organizations and their feature requests. This is how it seems now - a feature creep by committee. It's getting more and more bloated and unwieldy, sort of like what happened to AWS.
Microsoft is a juggernaut.
Re: GitHub introduces sub-issues, issue types and advanced search
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like ticketing is something that has been pasted on for corporate reasons. Keeping track of the work to be done doesn't require a ticketing system, anyone remember using Story Cards? A whiteboard?
Well, if they wanted to implement keeping track of work to be done , they'd have long ago implemented subissues, sub-subissues, and sub^n-issues , because obviously work does not break down into a list, or a one-level-deep tree - the natural data structure for breaking down work is a directed graph (and if you really must do an 80/20 on it, then a tree ). Sadly, to this day, out of popular software packages used in s…
I find its subtasks a little half baked and I feel like portions of Jira weren’t designed with sub-tasks in mind. We actually avoid them completely at my current work.
It’s understandable why a lot of systems don’t support sub-tasks. Hierarchical data structures are not the easiest to deal with and come with a litany of edge cases. It can also be quite overwhelming UX wise.
Re: GitHub introduces sub-issues, issue types and advanced search
#195Day 50 trillion of begging Github for a functional notification system so I can stop receiving infinite numbers of emails from all the bots and similar things commenting on PRs. Also being designated a codeowner in a large repo, the number of notifications I get daily from the number of PRs is fucking absurd, with no way of turning them off. Drives me up the wall daily. If a colleague doesn't straight up send me a PR…
Re: GitHub introduces sub-issues, issue types and advanced search
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
> FWIW, this specific feature - what they are now calling sub-issues - is actually better described as a framework for modeling proper parent-child relationships in their system, which is something quite hard to get right That's a wrong framework to use. Parent/child relationship is a special case of dependencies between tasks , which can be more generally modeled as start/finish relationships, i.e. one of: Start-to-…
Once you have sizing, the ability to make an issue dependent, estimated start / end, don’t you have everything needed to generate a PERT / Gantt chart?
Beyond merely generating a Gantt chart, when you have dependencies and estimated duration you can start estimating how long things will take and which ones can take longer or be delayed without impacting overall project time; add the ability to provide constraints on start and end time, and you can automatically schedule work (and re-schedule at it happens).
Most of these things are in every system in some form or other, but dependencies seem to be missing almost everywhere - and dependencies are the one key component that enable major benefits and turn the system into a proper project planning tool.
--
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_(project_management...
Re: GitHub introduces sub-issues, issue types and advanced search
#197I'm curious if there are folks here who work at for-profit orgs who use GitHub projects as their sole issue tracker for the entire org. How do you do it and what are the common pain points? Do you couple it with other issue trackers/project management tools like Jira? If so—why? I still feel GH Projects is solely aimed at OSS or dev-centric or dev-only orgs and doesn't cater to teams with non-devs, which is how I thi…
Yes, I'm an advisor for such a company. They are using Github Projects/Issues for all their internal development.
Their customer support uses a different ticketing system, though. Mostly because they need to interact with external users.
Re: GitHub introduces sub-issues, issue types and advanced search
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, if they wanted to implement keeping track of work to be done , they'd have long ago implemented subissues, sub-subissues, and sub^n-issues , because obviously work does not break down into a list, or a one-level-deep tree - the natural data structure for breaking down work is a directed graph (and if you really must do an 80/20 on it, then a tree ). Sadly, to this day, out of popular software packages used in s…
> I sometimes wonder how much of how Agile implementations look is a consequence of simplistic tooling. When your team's work planner is fundamentally unable to represent the basic idea that tasks can depend on other tasks In the agile world it's accepted that a task that today looks like it depends on another task may not have that dependency next week. Planning involves scheduling what the stakeholders prioritize n…
Planning and scheduling/prioritizing are two distinct processes people often confuse. Planning is about identifying what needs to be done, and breaking it down into a network of tasks joined by dependencies. Scheduling is figuring out who's going to do what and when they're going to do it.
Planning is figuring out your service needs e-mail verification, password reset, and some transactional messages, to stuff like "design e-mail templates" "write templates for {verification, reset, account confirmation} e-mails", "set up infra for sending e-mails", "add {verification, reset} URL flows", "make it send {verification, reset, confirmation} e-mail on {{relevant action}}", etc. Scheduling is me assigning "design e-mail templates" to Joe in graphics dept. and giving him 3 days for it, assigning you the "set up infra" task and giving you a week, and knowing the "make it send ..." tasks won't start until next sprint, at which point we'll find someone to do them, etc.
In naive Agile reality, while >, it gets recorded somewhere (e.g. product backlog), but it won't have its dependency relationship encoded. So every sprint, someone goes over a heap of such tasks, and has to manually reconstruct those relationships, to the degree it lets them plan out the next sprint or two. This both adds work and limits the ability to plan forward (you ain't going to be even thinking about stuff that's obviously beyond the horizon).
While it's true that stakeholder priorities change (as they should), and this affects scheduling, it affects planning much less, as the dependencies aren't about order in time, they're about order in execution. Dependencies aren't volatile - no matter what the stakeholders think this week, you won't be able to work on "make it send emails" until you can send e-mails (infra task) and have e-mails to send (design/write) and have them be useful (endpoints/routes for links). This is useful information to have encoded, particularly with more interdependent features - not only the system will help you do the scheduling correctly, it'll also let you quickly tell that unscheduling work on X now will delay work on Y down the line, etc.
Re: GitHub introduces sub-issues, issue types and advanced search
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, if they wanted to implement keeping track of work to be done , they'd have long ago implemented subissues, sub-subissues, and sub^n-issues , because obviously work does not break down into a list, or a one-level-deep tree - the natural data structure for breaking down work is a directed graph (and if you really must do an 80/20 on it, then a tree ). Sadly, to this day, out of popular software packages used in s…
I wouldn’t say Jira gets it right. I find its subtasks a little half baked and I feel like portions of Jira weren’t designed with sub-tasks in mind. We actually avoid them completely at my current work. It’s understandable why a lot of systems don’t support sub-tasks. Hierarchical data structures are not the easiest to deal with and come with a litany of edge cases. It can also be quite overwhelming UX wise.
That's true, and I can see why you avoid them. Last time I touched Jira, I quickly learned that subtasks are annoying.
Dependency releationships between tasks are more general and better overall. Unfortunately,
> Hierarchical data structures are not the easiest to deal with and come with a litany of edge cases. It can also be quite overwhelming UX wise.
Don't know of any software that fully figured it out. Even MS Project, which does the relationship and scheduling parts a-ok, is a PITA to use in general, and has some pretty annoying bugs that made me stop using it. Being able to irrecoverably brick the auto-scheduler and have it suddenly crash on opening the project file is a kind of show-stopper.
Another tricky challenge here is scope. Planning, scheduling and doing are three different mindsets, and it's tough to balance them all in a single tool. Someone who figures out how to do it well stands to make a lot of money.
Re: GitHub introduces sub-issues, issue types and advanced search
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
We did at my previous employer ( https://www.ourbranch.com/ ) in our data org. I can't totally remember, I'm pretty sure the engineering org did, too. It definitely is lacking in some of the advanced features you get with a Jira, but it was fine. I was surprised by how powerful GitHub Projects is. We also built out extra reporting for it in our data warehouse, using Fivetran for ELT.
Oh cool! I have some questions: 1. Does the data org work in isolation from other orgs? I'm guessing not. 2. Does the data org consist of non-engineers? If yes, are they also onboarded into GitHub with their own GH accounts? 3. If (1) is no, what tool is used to track cross-org work? Does the company also use Jira or some other tool and is GH projects integrated with them or something? I'm really curious about this w…
2. Most of the ICs didn't have an engineering background, and came from a more traditional data analyst background. When I arrived, the only thing actually version controlled in Git was LookML that wasn't actually used. Many learned Git and GitHub for the first time there.