Summary: This post gives a brief overview of what updates have been introduced to the team’s GitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ project management system so far, and outlines the next updates being planned. If you’d like to get involved with the next round of process updates, please comment below 😃
Updates so far
The Training Team migrated its project management tool from Trello to GitHub in early 2022. Since then, different updates have been implemented to the team’s project boards. These have included:
- Making use of GitHub-specific tools
- Creating entirely new projects for new processes (such as content localization)
- Ensuring current processes enable the growing number of contributors in the team to effectively contribute to the team goals
- Triaging the backlog of issues accumulated from Trello Project management system using the concepts of boards and cards to organize tasks in a sane way. This is what the make.wordpress.com/marketing team uses for example: https://trello.com/b/8UGHVBu8/wp-marketing. days
The team handbook now also has documentation regarding the team’s GitHub repository structure, and step-by-step guides for different team processes that use GitHub. These can be found on How we use GitHub and its child pages.
Current issue – checklists
Training Team processes have relied on checklists for a long time. However, due to the way access is set up in the WordPress GitHub organization, GitHub checklists can generally only be ticked by those who added the checklist to the issue. This has made it difficult for multiple contributors to effectively collaborate on a single issue. The checklists added to issue templates have been somewhat ineffective, as the person who submits an issue is in many cases not the person who will actually work on the issue.
To get around this issue, an idea was brought forth to move GitHub checklists into the handbook, and direct contributors to copy-paste the checklists into GitHub issues when they work on an issue. This update has been implemented into the following administrative processes, and has received positive feedback so far.
Next steps
It’s time to make similar changes regarding checklists to content development processes next. Here are specific tasks that need to be completed:
- Move checklists currently in content development issue templates into the handbook as markdown text which contributors can copy-paste as needed
- Update issue templates and project interfaces to link to the respective handbook entries
- Audit handbook entries around content development processes and update to reflect the new GitHub setup
Additionally, the team’s GitHub repository currently has 114 labels, of which 20 are not being used on any open issue. I suggest we audit the current list of labels and make sure they match the current processes and tracking needs in the team.
I will be able to start implementing these updates from July 31st, and am looking for one or two other volunteers to collaborate with. If you would like to get involved, please comment below, and I’ll discuss next steps with you!
Final thoughts
Switching project management tools is not an easy feat! I appreciate the efforts of Training Team members before me who got this work started.
The team also has a desire to implement automations into the GitHub repository to automate some of the manual processes. If you have experience with GitHub automations, and would like to help implement those into the team’s repository, please comment below.
#handbook, #process
