Developers, Here’s How to Work in GitHub with Fewer Clicks

An ideal world for developers has no meetings, few distractions, endless coffee, and long, uninterrupted periods to code. I assume.

In reality, things aren’t always so smooth. Most meetings should be emails or Slack messages. Handoffs are always a handful. Sprint planning is a chore. And managing projects in GitHub inevitably eats away at your time with endless clicks. Click. Click-click. Click.

Zenhub makes life easier for developers, and managing code in GitHub helps you on the path towards developer happiness. With Zenhub productivity management features, you can cut your clicks and focus on doing the work that matters.

Planning poker: the best excuse for canceling unnecessary meetings

Meetings get a bad rap, and for developers, often for a good reason. But backlog refinement meetings can add value to the development process by making simplifying estimation and prioritization. Unfortunately, the number of clicks you need to go through to get things done makes these meetings tedious. So, what if you could reduce the number of required meetings and use automation to get the value without spending the clicks?

Zenhub’s planning poker in GitHub feature does just that. You can story point asynchronously on your own time – right on the GitHub issue.

If votes provided by the rest of your team match up, the issue gets story pointed accordingly. Discrepancies in voting get flagged. That way, if you do need a meeting, everyone knows exactly what does (and doesn’t) need to be discussed.

Planning poker can’t kill every meeting and eliminate every click, but it can reduce how many clicks you need to worry about and the number of meetings you have to sit through. One of our internal development teams cut backlog refinement meetings from 1.5 hours to just 10 minutes. And by dealing with some or all the questions you’d typically need a meeting for in advance, the meetings you have to sit through will be much faster and more efficient.

Automated handoffs beat playing the clicking game

Handoff time is where many teams working in GitHub go astray on the path to developer Nirvana. What do we mean by handoff? It’s any time that you have to pass off work from one person or team to another. But tracking these can be tough. Should it be an email, a status change, or even a meeting?

In GitHub, your only real way to signal a handoff is with labels. Click to create one. Click to add the status. Since this is all done manually, you’ll spend more time clicking around to set things right if you forget what a label is for or grab the wrong one and mislabel something.

Save your clicks, and your sanity, by setting up automated handoffs in Zenhub. Arrange flows between workspaces ahead of time, then just watch them go. For example, if your dev team labels an issue done, have it automatically labeled as “ready” in quality assurance’s workspace. Information automatically propagates, so nobody gets confused, and issues don’t get mislabeled or lost.

Fewer clicks, fewer problems.

Automated sprints: because good enough is good enough

Sprint planning sessions are great. In theory. In reality, they’re often run inefficiently, even if they are super valuable. Click in. Click through the backlog. Drag issues around, file documents. Click, click, click.

But honestly, automation can handle this. Zenhub’s automated sprints feature pulls high-priority items from the backlog into your next sprints, streamlining the process. If it was a top-priority two weeks ago, odds are pretty good you still need to get it done.

It won’t be perfect. But if it’s 90% correct, there are a lot fewer clicks involved to fix that incorrect 10% than if you have to remake the whole thing from scratch.

Save on clicks (and sanity) with Zenhub

We hate wasting clicks as much as you do. Extra clicks on the wrong things are simply not productive and can take you away from focusing on the things that matter.

If you want to join us on the path to developer happiness, consider signing up for a free trial. To get started with integrating Zenhub into GitHub, check out our handy guide.