Announcing ZenHub Workspaces: Personalized Workflows For Every Team

At ZenHub we believe software development is a team sport. Yet, we recognize not all teams work the same way. This is true even for developers working on different parts of the same product. The software team is a diverse group of talent that spans disciplines, products, pods, methodologies, and workflows. Each layer of complexity requires a unique view into the work to be done while still promoting close collaboration across the whole team.

While development work spans multiple Repositories in GitHub, the project view into that work is often monolithic with a single workflow defining how that work progresses for all the diverse teams involved. High performing teams need to understand how work is progressing at both a high level and in ways relevant to their team and how they work. For this level of project management customization, today ZenHub is announcing Workspaces.

ZenHub Workspaces empowers software development teams to create different workflows using the same GitHub Repository. By personalizing their team’s individual space, a particular functional team defines what workflow steps are meaningful to them. For example, one team using Kanban and another team using Scrum can both apply workflows for each of those methodologies over the same set of underlying GitHub Issues. It also allows for the creation of high-level Workspaces to give management an overarching view into how multiple projects are progressing.

How to get started with ZenHub’s Workspaces

Getting your first Workspace set up is easy and only takes minutes. For ZenHub customers, use this easy to follow Workspaces quickstart guide. As a high level overview you will need to:

1. Create a new Workspace
2. Give your new Workspace a name and description
3. Add any number of Repositories to the Workspace
4. Set a default Repo where future Issues will default to on creation
5. Decide which Issues will appear in your newly created Workspace
6. Done! You now have a personalized Workspace!

Don’t have a ZenHub account? Sign up for a free 14-day trial to start using Workspaces today.

How Workspaces works in the real world

Each team works their way

Every pod on the software team can now have it’s own workflow with individualized pipelines and Issues that are only relevant to the work they are doing. For example, the QA team doesn’t have to wade through countless Issues related to bug fixes not ready for testing just to find the work that is of a high priority for them. This allows the whole team to focus on the same code base but maintain individualized workflows for different pods.

Multiple teams working on the same Issue

Software development work is rarely linear and your Board should reflect this fact. Often, steps in your development process overlap. For example, some feature development might start before the design team is done with high-fidelity mockups. A back-end and front-end team could also both be working on the same feature independently. Workspaces allows each of these teams to progress their work without affecting the other team’s work.

Separating feature work from bug fixes

Set up individual Boards to track new feature work separate from bug tracking. This allows you to triage bugs all on a single board and then assign them to the appropriate team for squashing.

Increase visibility into the software development cycle for the business teams

As every business becomes a software business entire organizations need to move closer to the code. Workspaces opens up a view of your software development project progress to the entire organization without bogging them down in needless details. For example, the executive team can create a Workspace with custom pipeline definitions to track project milestones that meet company-wide objectives.

Collaborate with remote workers, contractors, and off-shore teams

Distributed software teams bring both benefits and challenges. To ensure that different work styles don’t conflict, Workspaces can mirror each team’s own workflow, function as a single-access Workspace, or let them only focus on Issues that are relevant to them. This reduces disruption to the existing team’s work while still providing visibility into the status of the Issues.

Have different views into sprints and overarching goals

With Workspaces, the Board becomes a planning tool for Product Managers. Project Managers can create a Workspace separate from the development flow, so they can sort Issues according to business objectives. Using Workspaces this way lets the Board act as a visualization of how each individual Issue maps back to larger business goals while showing progress in each area.

Workspaces is our second major feature to launch this year after our March release of the ZenHub Reporting Suite. Over the coming months we will continue to release exciting new features for enterprise software teams. To see what we’re currently working on and submit your own ideas for what we should work on next, visit our Product Portal.

Interested in getting started with ZenHub today? Sign up for a free trial.