Make repeatable workflows for efficient with composable templates

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Job Story

When I need to create artifacts to track work and that work is a highly repeatable set of work items, I want to create more complex templates that utilize many different planning objects so that I can efficiently generate all the necessary work artifacts

Current Problems

  • Limited to only creating 1 artifact at a time.
  • Cannot chain artifacts together.
  • Cannot generate issues across more than 1 project at a time.
  • Cannot pass variables into a template, requiring someone to go and change all of the necessary fields in each issue that is created from an issue description template.
  • Cannot create nested artifacts.

Real world examples and workarounds

  • Our own marketing team has gotten really creative (kudos @johnjeremiah) with hacking around our limited to no support of the problems mentioned above. They create a spreadsheet that has all of the columns to represent the variables they want to set. Then they concat the strings together into the description so that issue meta-data gets set by quick action during issue creation.
  • The ask from another marketing team member was -- "please recreate my GDoc but inside of GitLab with Issues and Epics" (#25287)
  • Generate a set of issues/epics to conduct a compliance check (&1647)
  • Generate an epic and issues that contain the typical tasks you do for building a feature -- research, design, build, track, measure.

Ideal end state

graph TD
  Board --> Board_Lists
  Epic["Epic(s)"] --> Issues
  Variables --> Epic
  Variables --> Issues
  Epic --> Board
  Issues --> Board
  • Create a more complex template of mixed object types.
  • The template accepts variables/attributes that can be used to set meta-data within various objects -- including target project/group where a given artifact will be created.
  • The template can be composed from object specific templates that span multiple Groups and Projects (it has too for now because Epics live at the Group level and Issues at the Project level)

Related asks

  • Clone epic + issues (#25287)
Edited by 🤖 GitLab Bot 🤖