Introducing Smart Pipelines: A New Era for Zenhub Workspaces

When we first started Zenhub back in 2014, our mission was simple: make project management effortless for software teams. While our integration with GitHub was (and still is) integral to that story, automation and AI have since become a big part of how we’re delivering on that mission and helping development teams spend more time on work that matters. 

Despite the fact that automation and AI are now core to our product, the experience of managing Issues within a Zenhub workspace has remained mostly manual. That is, until now. 

Today, we’re excited to announce the latest automation feature in Zenhub: Smart Pipelines. Smart Pipelines are a series of user-requested enhancements that automate the process of setting and enforcing WIP limits, flagging stale issues on the board, and updating Issue metadata (e.g., labels, assignees, sprints) when an Issue changes pipelines. 

Read on to learn more.

What are Smart Pipelines?

Smart Pipelines is a set of powerful automations and customizable limits that can be configured at the pipeline level on the Zenhub board. These include automatically updating Issue metadata when Issues move to or from a pipeline, highlighting Issues considered “stale,” and setting work-in-progress (WIP) limits to prevent too many Issues from entering a single pipeline. 

Smart Pipelines are configurable directly on your Zenhub board. You can configure them by clicking on the pipeline name or by selecting the three dots on a pipeline and then “Settings & automation.”

Pipeline Automations

Probably the most exciting release included as part of Smart Pipelines is the ability to create automations at the pipeline level. These automations introduce significant time savings and increase accuracy when it comes to updating Issue metadata. Gone are the days of manually having to update labels or forgetting to unassign yourself when an Issue is ready to move on to the next stage in your workflow (yup, we’ve all been there!) 

To set this up, go to “Automations” under “Settings and automation” and select a “Trigger” (i.e., an Issue entering or exiting the pipeline). Then, choose an “Action” for what happens when the trigger occurs. Actions will either add or remove metadata (known as an “Element”) from the Issue. Currently, the metadata that can be automated are Assignees, Labels, Sprints, and Epics. Is there any other metadata you’d like to automate in Zenhub? Let us know in our product portal.

Use cases

• Automatically assign someone from your QA team (e.g., A QA lead) when an Issue enters the code review pipeline.
• You have a label specific to a pipeline (e.g., Automatically label an Issue as “Icebox” when an Issue is moved to the Icebox and remove the label when it is removed.)

Pipeline Issue limits (WIP Limits)

While we’d love to brag that we have a perfect track record when it comes to closing out stale work, we’d be lying if we said that we don’t have at least a few issues on our boards that have been there a bit too long (thankfully, we don’t judge). All joking aside, this can cause a ton of clutter on the board and cause important Issues to get missed. 

Luckily, now there’s an easy way to automate the process of flagging “stale” Issues. Turning on the “Issue age in pipeline” will visually highlight Issues in a pipeline after they’ve exceeded a defined period (e.g., more than 2 days “In review”).

To implement this, go to “Issue age in pipeline” under “Settings & automation.” From here, you can select the number of days old an Issue needs to be before it’s highlighted and customize the color and icon it will be highlighted with. 

Use cases

• Indicates to Product Managers, Scrum Masters, and other stakeholders when an Issue is stale, and action needs to be taken to archive or close it. 
• Helps team members remove Issues that are no longer a business priority, preventing the board from getting too cluttered with old Issues.

Issue age in pipeline

While we’d love to brag that we have a perfect track record when it comes to closing out stale work, we’d be lying if we said that we don’t have at least a few issues on our boards that have been there a bit too long (thankfully, we don’t judge). All joking aside, this can cause a ton of clutter on the board and cause important Issues to get missed. 

Luckily, now there’s an easy way to automate the process of flagging “stale” Issues. Turning on the “Issue age in pipeline” will visually highlight Issues in a pipeline after they’ve exceeded a defined period (e.g., more than 2 days “In review”).

To implement this, go to “Issue age in pipeline” under “Settings & automation.” From here, you can select the number of days old an Issue needs to be before it’s highlighted and customize the color and icon it will be highlighted with. 

Use cases

• Indicates to Product Managers, Scrum Masters, and other stakeholders when an Issue is stale, and action needs to be taken to archive or close it. 
• Helps team members remove Issues that are no longer a business priority, preventing the board from getting too cluttered with old Issues.

Final thoughts

We’re excited to bring automation to one of our product’s most heavily utilized features and are confident Smart Pipelines will add to the time savings and data accuracy that teams already love about using Zenhub.

Of course, these updates couldn’t have been possible without the voices of our users. Users have been asking for WIP limits, flagging stale issues, and pipeline automations for a while, so we can’t wait to see how teams leverage Smart Pipelines to simplify their own processes. 

We’d love to hear your feedback on what other automations and features you’d like to see in Zenhub–please leave us your feedback in our product portal here. If you have any questions about the new features, you can always contact our customer support team here. 

Want to see Zenhub in action? Book a demo with a Zenhub expert.