Copying Repository Issues and Project Boards

mikecrabb · January 19, 2021, 4:07pm

Hi Everyone,

I am teaching a course on Agile Software Development where I had planned on using gitHub classrooms as a way to share user stories with groups in my class. With this I had created each user story as an issue and had planned to get students to worth through organising these in a number of project boards, similar to the image below:

However, it doesn’t appear as if issue or project boards are copied along with the repositories when students clone repos through classrooms (or through any method that I can see).

I was wondering if this is something that others have come across or might know a work around to?

joelwross · January 26, 2021, 8:56am

We encountered this same problem a few years back. Our workaround was to write some scripts to use the GitHub API to create a new project board and upload the cards we wanted to that. So each group accepted the assignment, and then the next morning we ran the script to provide them all with the project board.

You can find most of what we used at GitHub - joncady/github_projects_testing (my TA’s repo)

profsmucker · January 25, 2021, 6:32pm

I’m using Miro (education account, 100 seats) for user stories and user story maps in my SE course. Don’t use the user story template. Just use the whiteboard and stickies. Miro is a great collaborative whiteboard.

For my Scrum board (some people call these Kanban), I have students successfully use Trello. I find the Github and Jira tools to be too high overhead for learning and also very much demanding a fixed way of working. Trello is dead simple and very flexible in usage. If Trello wasn’t so good for card manipulation, I’d stick with Miro. Both tools have their pros and cons. Here is the Trello board template I created for students to use that is based off a board that former students used successfully: Trello

I had looked at the github boards tools, and didn’t like them one bit in comparison to Trello. I found the UI non-intuitive last I played with it.

Prior to the pandemic, I required students to use paper based boards for user story maps and their Scrum boards. Now, we’re 100% remote, and so needed to move to the online tools.

profsmucker · January 25, 2021, 6:35pm

I’ll also add that I am using an organization outside of classrooms for my SE course. I and the TAs are owners, and I then add student as members and add them to teams. I’ve done this for several years. I like classrooms for assignments, but for the SE course, I prefer to have us all in the organization and operate more like a company. This way the students are not outside collaborators. You may have more success sharing materials in this manner than classrooms.