Sprint finalized and ready to close. Closed. Projects primed to mark as complete. Complete. Last Release ready for take off. Ready.

Standby for launch. In 3… 2… 1…

What a year it has been! We’re super excited to reveal the launch of our brand new website and to bring you some incredible updates and improvements in this edition of ZenHub Horizon (with our new website’s space theme we are rebranding our previously quarterly update ‘Confetti Moments’ ). 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 ✨

Brand new brand

You may have noticed a small change around on our blog but there’s an even bigger change over on ZenHub.com!

With 2021 right around the corner, we thought it was time for to embark on a new frontier (and to get as far away from 2020 as possible). Next year will be a giant leap for ZenHub with some big news coming very soon. Stay tuned!

Automatic Workspace setup

If you’ve created a new Workspace lately, you may have noticed we’ve partially set up the Board for you. And it’s working! Early stats show it saves time during initial setup for 95% of new Workspaces.

• Stale Issues go straight to the Icebox and are identified when it has been opened for more than 90 days.
• Issues in current Milestones are placed in the Sprint Backlog … “current” meaning all Issues in Milestones with a start date in the past and an end date in the future.
• Issues with connected Pull requests set as In Progress … and hopefully you’re getting those PRs reviewed and merged!

Workspace Label filtering

Speaking of Workspaces and noticing changes, you may have noticed a new change at the bottom of the new/edit Workspace page. In our charge to break down Workspaces into more specific needs, an entire Workspace can now be filtered by a Label… or two!

When a Workspace is filtered by a Label, only Issues with that Label will show up on your Board. We’ve seen this be a major boost to performance for teams using a single Workspace for multiple purposes (pro tip: break up your Workspace and use Workflow Automation ).

Performance, fixes, and updates

Update Ever want to know if an Issue in the Closed pipeline was connected to a PR? Stop what you’re doing right now and go look at your Board. It’s there, I promise!

Update The Cumulative flow and Control chart can now query for Issues up to 2 years ago! Yeah, not a big deal.

Update The “Burn Pipeline” in the Burndown report will now save a few clicks when selecting multiple pipelines. Clicking on any pipeline will set it and all later-stage pipelines as “Burn Pipelines.”

Update Dates for your Epics can now be set from the Epic page and will show up directly in your Roadmap!

Update A couple updates when authenticating: when your token expires, you’ll remain on the same page when you re-auth and, because of that, no more “Choose Organization” page.

Update We’ve had teams reach out about it being hard to get their team into ZenHub so we’ve highlighted the “Invite” button on the sidebar.

Update Admins can now remove other admins from the Dashboard. All that we ask is you send us the angry chat screenshots when someone is mistakenly removed.

Update Over the past few months, as GitHub’s UI updates, so does our onboarding! We’ve introduced a new, streamlined flow when creating new Workspaces with repos that have not been in a Workspace before.

Update Speaking of GitHub’s UI, all of our UI has been updated to work with GitHub’s new design updates! Except for…

(Partial) Bug fix Dark mode. We’ve fixed the strobe-lit Board and we’ll have another update on dark mode support within ZenHub in the new year.

Bug fix Remember the last time you opened an Issue from the Board and clicked on a link for a date? And do you remember your browser exploding? Well, it wasn’t pretty but we’ve written code to fix the joys of working directly within GitHub’s DOM.

Bug fix A user diagnosed and reported a race condition around the extension’s hash not always showing ZenHub. We fixed it for them. And for you. And for us.

Bug fix Fixed an issue with lines on Workflows being off by a few pixels.

Bug fix There was a bug when setting an estimate on some issues. That has been exterminated.

Bug fix We heard a few teams having slow Board updates when multiple teams were using the same Board at the same time. We’ve batched these requests and will continue working toward instant updates and performance issues through 2021.

Bug fix After opening the “Create…” menu on the sidebar, the sidebar wouldn’t collapse. So, we fixed that.

Bug fix When filtering the Board by a Release, then closing that Releasing and returning to the Board, the Board will no longer appear empty.

Bug fix If your list of Issues on an Epic page was crashing, you are the 1% … of our users on Windows 10.

On The Horizon

New developer experience

We will be releasing a few updates and features for developers in the new year to help with automating tasks within ZenHub and giving you more visibility on the status of your work where it matters.

• Launched! Show Issue-PR connection in the Closed pipeline
• Attach multiple Issues to a PR
• Make Issue-PR connections via GitHub Keywords
• Show reviewers and reviews on the Board
• Show draft and merge statuses on PRs across the app

Sprint planning

It happens all the time, every time, at the same time, on the same days. And in early 2021, we’ll be launching automated Sprints! There will always be multiple Sprints open in the future to plan in advance plus at the end of every Sprint, the current one will close and a new one will open. Yeehaw, Space Cowboy!

Launching along with this is the ability to move incomplete Issues from one Sprint to the next! And yes, it’s all automated. We receive weekly feedback of frustration that an Issue can only live in one Sprint which is a limitation of using GitHub Milestones as the connection.

With that said, after 5 years and multiple Milestone caches, we will be deprecating and distancing ourselves from GitHub Milestones and officially creating ZenHub Sprints. This allows us to extend and build fully featured Sprints without restriction. The change will happen over the first half of the year and you will be notified through your regularly scheduled Sprint planning.

Release report performance

We made performance a priority in 2020 and 2021 will be no different. To start, the Release report will be migrated to our new backend in search of more major speed improvements. Check the next ZenHub Horizon for an update!

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.