GitLab Project Management - Hands-On Lab: Create Issues

This Hands-On Guide walks you through creating issues and labels in GitLab.

Estimated time to complete: 45 minutes

Objectives

Issues are a core building block in GitLab that enable collaboration, discussions, planning and tracking of work. Issues are defined in the scope of a Project, not a Group. You can read more about them in the documentation.

Task A. Create and manage labels

You can use labels to categorize epics, issues, and merge requests using colors and descriptive titles like bug, feature request, or docs. This allows you to dynamically filter and manage epics, issues, and merge requests. You can read more about them in the documentation.

  1. Navigate to your Awesome Inc group.

  2. In the left pane, click Manage > Labels.

  3. Click New label in the upper right hand corner.

  4. In the Title field, enter Status::Open. The 2 colons in the label title mean that this will be a scoped label.

    A scoped label uses a double-colon (::) syntax in its title, for example: workflow::in-review. An issue, merge request, or epic cannot have two scoped labels, of the form key::value, with the same key. If you add a new label with the same key but a different value, the previous key label is replaced with the new label.

  5. In the Description field, type Item that is ready to begin work .

  6. For the label’s color, GitLab supports any hex color code. For this label, choose Blue-gray from the suggested color palette (or type #6699cc in the Background color field).

  7. Click Create label.

  8. Create the following additional labels, setting a description and background color of your choosing. Note that some of these are scoped and some are unscoped.

    • Status::WIP
    • Status::Done
    • Priority::High
    • Priority::Medium
    • Priority::Low
    • Dev
    • QA
    • Security

  9. Go to your Family Budget Calculator project. The project is inside the Awesome Inc > Software > Core group hierarchy.

  10. Click Manage > Labels from the left sidebar.

  11. Click the star icon to the left of the Subscribe button to designate the following labels as prioritized labels. Prioritized labels appear at the top of your labels list.

    • Priority::High
    • Priority::Medium
    • Priority::Low

Task B. Create issues for tracking work

  1. In your Family Budget Calculator project, click Plan > Issues from the left sidebar.

  2. Click the New issue button.

  3. In the title section, type Third-party financial services integration.

  4. The description is an optional section, but feel free to type in your own description for this issue.

  5. Using the Assignees dropdown, assign the issue to yourself by clicking on the dropdown, and then clicking on your username. While we will leave the options as they are for now, it is important to understand what they do:

    • Epic: Associates the issue with an epic.

    • Milestone: Milestones in GitLab are a way to track issues and merge requests created to achieve a broader goal in a certain period of time.

    • Labels: Apply labels to your issue, which are metadata tags that can be used to sort and filter your issues.

    • Weight: Apply a weight value to your issue to measure the time, complexity, or value a given issue has or costs.

    • Due date: Use in issues to keep track of deadlines and make sure features are shipped on time.

    • Iteration: Associate the issue with an iteration to track it over a period of time. This allows teams to track velocity and volatility metrics.

  6. Click the Create issue button.

  7. In the issue metadata pane, click Edit next to the Labels field.

  8. Select the Status::Open label, then click away from the metadata pane to apply the label to the issue.

  9. Repeat the previous 2 steps to apply the Priority::Medium and Dev labels to the issue.

  10. In the left pane, click Plan > Issues. You will see the issue you just created in the list along with its labels.

  11. Create a second issue by clicking New issue in the top right of the issue list page.

  12. In the Title section, type Backend services.

  13. Paste the following in the Description section:

    1
2
3

    - Create DB
- Create service infrastructure
- Write documentation

  14. Using the Assignees dropdown, assign the issue to yourself by clicking on the dropdown, and then clicking on your username.

  15. Click the Create issue button.

  16. Apply the following labels to the Backend services issue by clicking on tne label, then click away from the metadata pane to apply the label to the issue: Dev, Status::Open, and Priority::High.

  17. In the left pane, click Plan > Issues to see both issues with their labels.

  18. Create a third issue by clicking New issue in the top right of the issue list page.

  19. In the Title section, type Frontend services.

  20. Paste the following in the Description section:

    1
2
3

    - UX design
- Integration
- Write documentation

  21. Using the Assignees dropdown, assign the issue to yourself by clicking on the dropdown, and then clicking on your username.

  22. Click Create issue.

  23. Apply the following labels to the Frontend services by clicking on tne label, then click away from the metadata pane to apply the label to the issue: Dev, Status::WIP, and Priority::High.

  24. In the left pane, click Plan > Issues to see all 3 issues with their labels.

Suggestions?

If you’d like to suggest changes, please submit them via merge request.

Last modified April 26, 2024: Update Lab Descriptions (05f28a88)
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