GitLab Agile Portfolio Management- Hands-On Lab: Task Management & Progress Tracking

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 the New label button.

  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 > Work items from the left sidebar.

  2. Click the New item button.

  3. Ensure that the Type field is set to Issue.

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

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

  6. 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:

    • Parent: 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.

    • Dates: 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.

  7. Click the Create issue button.

  8. Open the issue you just created by clicking on its name.

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

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

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

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

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

  14. In the Title section, type Backend services.

  15. Paste the following in the Description section:

    - Create DB
- Create service infrastructure
- Write documentation

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

  17. Click the Create issue button.

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

  19. In the left pane, click Plan > Work items to see both issues with their labels.

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

  21. In the Title section, type Frontend services.

  22. Paste the following in the Description section:

    - UX design
- Integration
- Write documentation

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

  24. Click Create issue.

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

  26. In the left pane, click Plan > Work items to see all 3 issues with their labels.

Task C. Create a View based on your labels

Now that you have some labels in place, we can start to use these to create your own personalised work item views. These can be used to easily see which work items match certain conditions, allowing you to make views which show work items assigned to you, or that have certain labels, or any of the other filtering capabilities.

  1. Navigate to Plan > Work items.

  2. Click into the filter bar (which should currently be filtered to “State is Open”). From the dropdown, select Label, then select is, then select the Priority::High label.

  3. Filter your workitem list to this label by pressing the filter button (the magnifying glass icon on the right-hand side of the filter bar).

    This will filter down to just your high priority issues.

  4. To turn this into a View, click the + Add View button to the right of the All Items header above the filter bar, and select New View

  5. Title the view with High Priority Issues, and add any description you would like.

  6. Click Create View.

  7. Notice that there is now a tab next to the All items tab titled High Priority Issues, which will maintain the filter that you selected.

Lab Guide Complete

You have completed this lab exercise. You can view the other lab guides for this course.

Suggestions?

If you wish to make a change to the lab, please submit your changes via Merge Request.

Last modified April 10, 2026: Resolve "ILT Lab Update - 18.10 Release Updates" (c0c3493a)
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