We’re excited to bring you some incredible updates and improvements in this spring edition of ZenHub Horizon. Read on to learn more about everything we’ve built, optimized, and fixed.

ZenHub Horizon is our quarterly update highlighting the most recent and relevant product improvements to help you stay up to date.

What’s new ✨

Developer experience

As we continue our quest of automating the tedious out of development workflows, developers are at the heart of it all so we’ve released a few things to help you out.

• Using GitHub Keywords will automatically connect Pull requests to Issues within ZenHub. These connections also happen automatically in newly created Workspaces!
• Pull requests can now be connected to multiple Issues. Hey, we know it’s not the “correct” way to plan but sometimes things happen.
• Reviewers and review status can be seen on Issue cards as well as a read-only state on the Issue sidebar in the web app. Green = approved, red = requested changes, yellow = pending, grey = comments — just like GitHub!
• Pull request status is front and center to the left on Issue cards.
  Green = open, red = closed, purple = merged, grey = draft — just like GitHub!

Automatic sprint planning

It has been a month since we launched ZenHub Sprints and we have already seen over 1,000 organizations automate their workflows through Sprints! What are the key differences between Sprints and Milestones?

• Since a Sprint is ZenHub data (where a Milestone is GitHub data), the Burndown chart for Sprints loads ~5x faster and the Velocity chart loads ~8x faster than the old chart.
• 3 Sprints are always open. When one Sprint closes, a new Sprint is created!
• Sprints can be built automatically from a backlog pipeline based on your team’s velocity by simply toggling on the setting.
• Speaking of settings, Sprints can automatically move unfinished work at the end of a Sprint to your next Sprint!

Since the release, we’ve also made a few more changes to help with planning:

• The Burndown chart only shows completion when an Issue is closed within the start and end dates. Now that an Issue can live in multiple Sprints, they will only be counted once as “completed” across all charts.
• Filter the Board by Issues not within a Sprint. This was some immediate feedback we heard on launch day for those triaging their backlogs.
• Your team’s velocity is visible when setting up automated Sprints. If you’ve used Milestones in the past, your velocity will be shown during setup.

Performance, fixes, and updates

Here is a highlight of some of the smaller changes in the past few months.

Performance Another optimization for the Board was recently released, seeing a 20% improvement in loading time!

Performance I know, you’re tired of hearing us talk about our new backend but we’ve moved over the Assignee selector in the Issue sidebar to (you guessed it) our new backend and have seen 12x performance improvements for our largest teams!

Update Videos (.mp4) can be uploaded and viewed in Issues and comments within the ZenHub web app (support for the ZenHub extension coming soon).

Update To help you get up and running faster with a new Workspace, Issues updated in the last 30 – 90 days will automatically be moved to the Sprint Backlog (note: this only happens the first time you create a Workspace).

Update The Issue page in the web app keeps the author, creation date, and action buttons pinned to the top for easy access.

Update Optimized comment rendering in the web app when the text was over 1,500 characters. That’s a lot of acceptance criteria!

Update Real-time updates for Sprints are now in all parts of ZenHub!

Update The UI for multi-select is more visible within an Issue card.

Update With the addition of the Sprints filter on the Board, we’ve redesigned the filters and menu bar to show more filters by default.

Update The Issue page has changed slightly with a refresh of icons, buttons, and overall design. Keep your eyes peeled for a change sliding in to the Board soon.

Bug fix Switching between Workspaces now remembers the selected repos rather than showing an incomplete list in the Board’s repo filter.

Bug fix The Burndown chart was displaying all closed Sprints as closed “Today.” It will now show the actual date it was closed. If it’s still showing “Today,” it may be time to review your Sprint schedule.

Bug fix From an Issue page, you can (again) select the “Closed” pipeline.

Bug fix Some Issues had too many comments for the GitHub API so we’ve reduced our initial request and will paginate the remaining timeline items.

On The Horizon

Release report performance

We made performance a priority in 2020… and 2021 will be no different. We are half way through migrating our Release report to our new backend in search of more major speed improvements. Check the next ZenHub Horizon for an update! And, if you’ve read this far, the Release report migration is a necessary step because our next performance project will focus strictly on the Board.

Asynchronous estimation

As more of us move to remote teams, we hear requests for more options with estimation. While the “old fashioned” way to throw up erratic hand gestures at each other in a room, we’ve received a lot of requests from developers wanting to pre-plan before getting together as a team during refinement.

You should know better than to count your [estimates] when you’re sittin’ at the table!

That’s all, folks

As always, we’re excited to bring you new features and improvements and we will continue listening to your feedback through our public product roadmap.

And don’t forget, we’re on Slack! You can now stay up-to-date on what’s new and share learnings, tips, and tricks with the ZenHub community. Click here to join.