Using Project Boards

What is a project board?

A project board is a tool that helps you plan, track, and manage a piece of work. Visually similar to a Microsoft Teams Planner board, it’s made up of columns and cards:

  • Columns represent stages of work, e.g., To Do, In Progress, Done
  • Cards represent tasks. These can be issues, pull requests, or notes.

Project boards connect directly to your GitHub repository. That means:

  • When someone opens an issue, you can add it to the board as a card.
  • When a pull request is opened or merged, the card can move automatically.
  • Everyone on the team sees the same board, so it’s easy to collaborate

Setting up a Project Board

To set up a GitHub project board, navigate to “Projects” within your repo:

Select ‘New Project’. You can choose a template to follow (e.g., Kanban board or Roadmap) or you can start from scratch. Here is an example of an empty project board using the Kanban template:

You can rename your project board by clicking “Edit project name”. Here you can also give the project a description and update the ReadMe.

Tip

Set the repository as the “Default Repository”. This will link all cards directly to the repository.

Using your Project Board

The Kanban project board template has the following columns:

  • Backlog: items that haven’t yet started
  • Ready: items ready to be picked up
  • In progress: items being actively worked on
  • In review: items currently being reviewed
  • Done: items that have been completed.

Editing the template

You can edit column names and descriptions, hide or delete columns or reorder the columns by clicking the three dots in the top-right:

Adding cards

Use the “Add item” button at the bottom of each column to create a new card. For a new issue you can:

  • Name the card and add a description
  • Assign someone (including yourself) to do the work
  • Add labels and issue types, including priority labels

You can also add a card that links to an existing issue.

Tip

The more detail you can add to a card, the better!

Extra features

Linking to a branch

You can either:

  • Create a new branch to complete the work
  • Link the card to an existing branch

This makes it quick & easy navigate to the pull request for the branch, track progress during QA and see any comments written before the branch was merged into main. When the branch is merged with main, the linked card will automatically move the to “Done” column.

Sub-issues

You can create a series of sub-issues related to a card:

New cards are created for each sub-issue. This means you can assign different team members (or yourself) to different sub-issues, create individual branches and track progress separately. The relationships section also lets you see which issues and sub-issues are related:

Notifications

You will automatically receive notifications for any cards you are assigned too. You can unsubscribe or customise your notifications.