GitLab: Board with Milestones as lists?

Question

I'm currently using GitLab Enterprise in a team project. I now want to build out a board-based roadmap similar to Pivotal Tracker, Aha or Trello. (For this view, each month would be a "list" or Aha "milestone". We could then drag roadmap items from one month to another and the whole team can see where we are and our Issue priorities visually.)

I'm hoping we can only use GitLab for this and not need to integrate yet another tool. In the "Boards" section of GitLab, I see I can make lists from GitLab Labels. This is OK, but I'd really like to make lists from GitLab Milestones. (Otherwise, I'd need to make another Milestone just to capture everything in the label.)

Am I missing something? Or is that really the best way to approach this with GitLab?

Answer 1

Milestones weren't designed with this use case in mind. Generally, once an issue is assigned to a Milestone, it doesn't change.

A common use case for milestones is to track Sprints or Iterations as milestones. The milestone's start and due dates would be the sprint start/end date respectively. During planning. issues would be tied to the appropriate milestone based on the sprint. If the work isn't finished by the due date (within the sprint period) the milestone stays the same.

Another use case is to use a milestone to track a scheduled release. In this case the start date can be empty, and the due date would be the release date. With this, if the release is missed the milestone still stays the same (ie, the issues are still attached the same) but it's completed after the due date.

Milestones do give some useful views about the attached issues, but not a board to move issues between them. Like you mentioned the only way to do that is with Labels, but they should work fine. You can customize the Labels you want to show up on a Board, and they order they're in. The only annoying (to me) thing about boards is that you can't get rid of the Open/Close lists, you can only collapse them. Looking at this issue (https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-foss/-/issues/37747) I doubt it will ever happen.

Answer 2

If you use gitlab.com, https://gitboard.co/ has the milestone or epic board which could help your case. The auto sprint could create and close the regular scheduled milestone/sprint or whatever you call it.

Answer 3

There is a roadmap feature for GitLab (premium/ultimate only)

It has evolved with GitLab 14.8 (February 2022)

Additional display options for roadmaps

In this release, we have introduced additional progress tracking capabilities to roadmaps. You can now view the percentage of completed epics based on issue count instead of issue weight. This functionality is useful for organizations that are using Kanban or other methodologies that don’t require their teams to set a weight on issues.

You can now also customize the level of milestones to include in your roadmap, allowing you to tailor your view to meet the needs of your audience.

See Documentation and Issue.