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Automatically Add Default Issue Lists for Issue Boards

Problem

  • Not setting default lists automatically for new Issue Boards increases the barrier to entry and adoption for first time users of Issue Boards.

Goal

  • Decrease time to value for Issue Boards

Proposal

  • When a new Group is created, automatically create To Do and Doing labels with a fairly vanilla description for each.
  • For each sub-group, sub-sub-group, and project within the hierarchy, the To Do and Doing labels should be inherited.
  • If the project is being created outside of a group, automatically create the labels in the project.
  • On the issue board, Instead of showing the temporary issue list prompting the user to "add default lists" or "nevermind, i'll create my own", automatically seed the Issue Board with Open, To Do, Doing, and Closed Issue Lists.
  • When creating a new Issue Board, automatically seed the board with the lists from ☝.

UX

default lists

Other Considerations & Context Around Labels

  • Consider a large organization with many teams and projects using the top level To Do label on their issue boards. That label can be easily deleted, which would irreversibly cascade down their the entire sub-group/project hierarchy resulting in data lost on issues and the issue list disappearing from every single issue board that uses it. Maybe we should consider making label deletion safer and less destructive 🤔
  • If we default to creating these labels on each and every project, we then have the annoyance of duplicated labels n number of times through the entire sub-group hierarchy with no feedback in the UI which label belongs to which group, sub-group, or project -- leading to people inadvertently selecting the wrong To Do label and issue not showing up on the issue board. We should probably address this via #24553 (closed).
  • There is also the existing annoyance of different behavior of labels depending on what context the label is applied - #17461. There are also strong advocates that don't want labels removed when issues are closed from the issue board.

Release Notes

In most cases, teams will be best served by keeping their workflows as simple as possible. To encourage this and make the first touch experience with a Board more efficient and approachable, creating a new Board will now automatically pre-populate To Do and Doing lists so you can get straight to managing Issues.

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/issue_board.html#first-time-using-an-issue-board

Edited by Gabe Weaver