Planning your work

Organize your work and track your progress so you always know what to build next.

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Next:Connecting to your code locally

In this article

Before you write code, capture what you want to build and track your progress. In this tutorial, you'll plan and organize work for your website's first feature using GitHub Issues and Projects.

Prerequisites

Creating an issue

Issues track ideas, tasks, and bugs for your software project. Create one for the first feature you'll build: a list of starred repositories on your web page.

  1. On the main page of your stargazers-log repository, click Issues.
  2. Click New issue.
  3. In the Add a title field, type Display a list of starred repositories.
  4. In the description field, add a few details about what you want to build, such as "Show a list of starred repositories on the home page."
  5. Click Create.

Creating a project board and importing your issue

Projects give you visual tables, boards, and roadmaps to organize and track issues for your software projects. In this tutorial, you'll create a user project board for stargazers-log.

  1. On GitHub, in the top right corner of GitHub, click your profile picture, then click Profile.
  2. Click Projects.
  3. Click New project.
  4. Under Templates, select Board.
  5. In the project name field, type Stargazers log.
  6. Leave Import items from a repository checked, to import the issue you recently created to the board.
  7. Click Create project.

Moving work across the board

The board's columns represent stages of your work. As you make progress, move each item to show its status.

  1. On your project board, find the Display a list of starred repositories item in the Todo column.
  2. Drag the item into the In Progress column to show that you've started the work.

You'll return to the board later to move the item to Done once your feature is live.

Adding follow up issues

Create one or more issues to describe ideas and features for your website that you want to work on later. For example, you might create an issue to:

  • Add a search feature to your website
  • Improve the styling of the starred repositories list
  • Allow filtering of starred repositories by programming language, such as JavaScript, Python, or Go

Add each new issue to your project board, and move it into In Progress once you start working on it.

What you accomplished

TaskOutcome
Created an issueYou captured your first feature as a trackable task.
Created a project boardYou set up a board to organize and track your work.
Tracked your progressYou added the issue to the board and moved it into progress.
Added more issuesYou created new issues to capture future work for your website.

Next steps

  • With your work planned, bring your repository to your computer so you can start writing, storing, and updating your website code. Continue to Connecting to your code locally.