GitLab and Scrum

I’m using GitLab Premium / Enterprise (trial) at work and we use Scrum at the project management level. I can’t be the only one doing this. I’m curious how people manage projects with Scrum while the developers are using GitLab.

Currently our product is a ‘group’ in GitLab and that group has multiple ‘projects’ and each project is a repository in git. There are things like a front-end, back-end, frobs, widgets, content…etc, each in its own git repo but all are part of one product.

In Scrum, we have ‘features’ and ‘user stories’ and ‘tasks’. In GitLab, we just have ‘issues’. So we end up trying to create ‘labels’ to match these things. But it’s like the pounding the proverbial square peg in round hole!

There is a kanban board but it’s per project. I haven’t found any way to see an overall kanban board for the group of projects. (I have tried the enterprise version of gitlab by the way.)

If I create an issue and label it as a user story, how do I link this to it’s other issues which might be tasks? The only way I have found is to embed the links in the description.

Is there some way to figure out who’s doing what? Specifically I’d love to see something which shows who’s got which issues in their pipeline. This is especially important when implementing some big feature that requires some juggling of resources and making sure something gets done before someone else can work on another piece of it.

And then there are things like story point estimation, burn down charts in relation to sprints which I have no idea how to do in GitLab, though I do see there is a field for estimation.

How do people managing medium to large projects use GitLB? Is there some scrum over-the-top integration that people use that brings it all together?

We use Asana at the corporate level to manage what the company is doing. We definitely don’t want to replicate the details from GitLab into Asana with some connector. We have been creating high level features in Asana as cards and linking them to GitLab using embedded links in the description. But there needs to be some level of automation between Asana so when tasks (issues) are finished, the feature gets marked as finished. I don’t think Asana is a great Scrum tool either.

Please could someone who has trodden this path before enlighten me as to what the right direction is to manage projects with Scrum and use GitLab?

Hi @mgrant,

I have all of your problem and more :

• How deal with sprint properly ? Milestones ? But what if we want release as milestones ?
• How to deal with user-story skill point voted by planning poker ? If we can’t set skill points to the issue and see the total cost of point for a column issue board then we haven’t the sprint vision, we cannot calculate the burndown ?

Since 2 years we have to tools, gitlab and vivify because of theses issues and that’s a big pain. We are really tired of this.

We are currently using Jira for issue tracking, and scrum stuff. Any suggestion would be great on how to map functionality to gitlab.

We are a startup with a 2 tier software project (Backend/Frontend) which is always expanding having the same problem as @mgrant ! I wonder why GitLab is not providing a proper solution for this. We switched from Atlassian Bitbucket to Gitlab few months ago for its sleek look and feel and easy to use repository management. But now we are in the stage where we need some sprint planning and project management tool. We tried to integrate ASANA with Gitlab but its not the same. So only option remaining is to move back to Atlassian bitbucket and use JIRA for planning. But I would much rather like to stay with Gitlab if there is a tool like JIRA. If anyone knows a way to do this, your support is much appreciated.

We are in the same situation. I have multiple repositories for different parts of the project. We have 2 applications with 10 repositories (models, APIs, web frontend, back office, etc…) but we see that issues are “per repository” and not per projects.

Looks like gitlab lacks the distinction between projects and repositories. I am tempted to create a repository for all the “design” of projects, and assign there issues, but then we will encounter that issues related to a particular repo (a frontend bug, a model feature idea) will not be correctly linked.

Hi everyone, it seems that this thread haven’t been solved yet.
I was as well wondering what the good practice is, considering that GitLab might already handle all Agile Artefacts in a way or another. My search engine led me to https://about.gitlab.com/2018/03/05/gitlab-for-agile-software-development/, which seems to answer our common question.

Enjoy the reading.

We have the same issues. I’d like to use GitLab fpr the whole software cycle including Scrum backlog, planning, burndown etc. Does anyone know if those features will be implemented or do I need to work with Jira as is?

Thanks

We have also a discussion here about Scrum and how it is implemented in bitbucket+JIRA. Is there something like an official feature request?

If a third party add-in is an option, you can get detailed analytics of your issue data that can be helpful when doing Scrum, from the Screenful Dashboard for GitLab.

Here’s a direct link to a live demo using data from the GitLab Runner project.

GitLab have blogged on the subject: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2018/03/05/gitlab-for-agile-software-development/. The mappings from SCRUM to GitLab seem sane.