Bring Boards in line with github's "projects": Add specific issues to boards
Problem to solve
Right now "Boards" are an odd thing where you can create as many boards as you like, except every single board shows every open issue, and the only way to filter that down is to filter by milestone, or label, instead of the far more obvious "assign an issue to one or more boards: that's where they show up", with a special bit of UI when you're on a board's page for adding issues from the general "open" pool to "this board".
Intended users
Anyone who actually wants to segment the work into task-specific boards, for people to work on without having to think about, or be confronted with, the entire task list of everyone in the same org.
Further details
Github actually does this really well (although they call them "projects", which is less sensible): issues can be assigned to any number of boards, and each board only shows the issues assigned to it, with templates for board "streams". You can add more issues to that board with a dedicated UI and it is amazingly useful compared to the Boards as currently available in Gitlab.
Proposal
Look at what github offers, replicated that, and make it better. For example, Github doesn't have any UI to make a new issue "for this board", which is really weird. Gitlab on the other handle already does have this, and it's great.
What does success look like, and how can we measure that?
Right "more than one Board" is effectively a bad experience, so I'm sure analytics around "how many people are using Boards now that they're actually better" could work as a KPI.
Links / references
Let's use a simple single-person repo as example: I'm working on a project to implement a web game, and I have several Boards ("projects") for managing the different kinds of work that needs to happen. When I'm looking at a board, I couldn't care less about tasks relating to other boards, and I don't ever want to see anything else because it'll at best distract, and at worst cause me to start working on "some task not related to this board".
- https://github.com/Pomax/mj/projects gives me a clear choice in what to work on right now
- https://github.com/Pomax/mj/projects/1 shows me only those issues that should be worked on when there is time to do new development.
- https://github.com/Pomax/mj/projects/3 shows me only those issues that should be worked on during down time
- https://github.com/Pomax/mj/projects/2 aren't even "code" related issues: when I'm writing documentation or tutorials, I should never be confronted by anything even remotely talking about writing code.
This is a fantastic way to offer Boards, and gitlab would be so much better if it made Boards similar to milestones, with issues that can be assigned to Boards, instead of Boards needing to run "on top of" other metadata before they're useful. https://github.com/