The GitLab Issue Tracker is an advanced and complete tool for tracking the evolution of a new idea or the process of solving a problem.
It allows you, your team, and your collaborators to share and discuss proposals before and while implementing them.
GitLab Issues and the GitLab Issue Tracker are available in all GitLab Products as part of the GitLab Workflow.
Issues can have endless applications. Just to exemplify, these are some cases for which creating issues are most used:
- Discussing the implementation of a new idea
- Submitting feature proposals
- Asking questions
- Reporting bugs and malfunction
- Obtaining support
- Elaborating new code implementations
See also the blog post "Always start a discussion with an issue".
For instance, let's assume you have a public project but want to start a discussion on something you don't want to be public. With Confidential Issues, you can discuss private matters among the project members, and still keep your project public, open to collaboration.
With Multiple Assignees for Issues, available in GitLab Starter you can streamline collaboration and allow shared responsibilities to be clearly displayed. All assignees are shown across your workflows and receive notifications (as they would as single assignees), simplifying communication and ownership.
Create issue templates to make collaboration consistent and containing all information you need. For example, you can create a template for feature proposals and another one for bug reports.
The Issue Tracker is the collection of opened and closed issues created in a project. It is available for all projects, from the moment the project is created.
Find the issue tracker by navigating to your Project's homepage > Issues.
When you access your project's issues, GitLab will present them in a list, and you can use the tabs available to quickly filter by open and closed issues.
You can also search and filter the results more deeply with GitLab's search capacities.
View issues in all projects in the group, including all projects of all descendant subgroups of the group. Navigate to Group > Issues to view these issues. This view also has the open and closed issues tabs.
The image bellow illustrates how an issue looks like:
Learn more about it on the GitLab Issues Functionalities documentation.
Read through the documentation on creating issues.
Learn distinct ways to close issues in GitLab.
Read through the documentation on moving issues.
Read through the documentation on deleting issues
Learn more about it on the GitLab Issues Functionalities documentation.
Learn how to find an issue by searching for and filtering them.
Whenever you want to keep the discussion presented in a issue within your team only, you can make that issue confidential. Even if your project is public, that issue will be preserved. The browser will respond with a 404 error whenever someone who is not a project member with at least Reporter level tries to access that issue's URL.
Learn more about them on the confidential issues documentation.
Create templates for every new issue. They will be available from the dropdown menu Choose a template when you create a new issue:
Learn more about them on the issue templates documentation.
Learn more about crosslinking issues and merge requests.
The GitLab Issue Board is a way to enhance your workflow by organizing and prioritizing issues in GitLab.
Find GitLab Issue Boards by navigating to your Project's Dashboard > Issues > Board.
Read through the documentation for Issue Boards to find out more about this feature.
With GitLab Starter, you can also create various boards per project with Multiple Issue Boards.
Alternatively to GitLab's built-in Issue Tracker, you can also use an external tracker such as Jira, Redmine, or Bugzilla.
Read through the API documentation.
Find out about bulk editing issues.