GitLab Pointers

Recommended Viewing

GitLab Agile Project Management Demo video.

Terminology for Scrum within GitLab

• For Sprint use Milestone in GitLab
• For PBI use Issue in GitLab
• For Story Points use Weight in GitLab
• For Pull Request use Merge Request in GitLab
• For Subtask use markdown lists within issue description in GitLab

Creating a Sprint (Milestone)

1. Hover over Issues on the navigation bar on the left and select Milestones
2. Enter title
3. Enter start and end dates. Note: Milestones cannot have overlapping dates so make sure to end the previous milestone the day prior the start of the next sprint.
4. Enter the sprint goal in the description
5. Select Create milestone

You can create milestones at the subgroup level or in individual projects.

6. Create a Ceremonies PBI to log time for meetings and overhead

Creating PBIs

A Product Backlog Item is an Issue in GitLab. Issues must be created in a specific project.

1. Select Issues from the navigation bar on the left
2. Select New Issue
3. Enter title and description
4. Add a label to classify the type of PBI (User Story, Spike, Defect Fix, or Ceremony)
5. Enter number of story points (if known) in the Weight field
6. Select Submit issue

Tasks

Tasks needed to complete a PBI should be added to the description of the Issue. Use a markdown checklist. The following:

As a senior design team using Gitlab I would like to generate reports so that I can show my progress to my advisor.

- [ ] Grab data
     - [ ] Parse it into markdown
- [ ] Add extra space on the bottom for individuals to write 1-2 sentences worth of comments
- [ ] Generate a markdown report

produces:

GitLab's documentation on How to use GitLab for Agile software development is pretty good. Check it out.

Estimating Time

Each task should have a time estimate associated with it (shown in parentheses at the end of the task). A comment should be added to the issue with /estimate [TIME] where [TIME] is the total amount of time for all of the tasks associated with the issue. E.g., 8h for eight hours.

The time estimate can be removed by adding a comment including /remove_estimate.

Spending Time

Whenever work is done on a PBI, a comment should be added to the issue and the amount of time spent should be noted on a separate line at the end of the comment. The ending line should take the following form:

/spend 1h 2019-09-13

NOTE: Comments added to an issues should be linked to issues, commits, merge requests. To link a message to any of these use the following format:

• Commit — pasting the entire commit number from a branch or merge request will automatically create a link
• Issue — #X where X is the number of the issue
• Merge Request — !X where X is the number of the merge request

Check out GitLab's Time Tracking documentation.

Pull Requests

GitLab calls pull requests "Merge Requests." You can create a request from an issue by selecting Create Merge Request which will create a branch and corresponding merge request in one step. This will automatically connect the issue and merge request by placing "Closes #X" in the description of the merge request, so the merged merge request closes the corresponding issue.