Issues pilot: New issues experience feedback

Pilot Participation

Thank you for your interest in being an early tester of the new issues experience! Your feedback will help us ensure a smooth rollout of the new experience to all users.

GitLab Team Members: Please use [INTERNAL] New issues experience pilot for feedback.

Pilot process

As a participant in this pilot you should have a feature flag enabled for your account which makes the "New issue look" badge appear in the top right of any issue.

Click the "New issue look" badge and turn the toggle that appears to "ON" to enable the new experience.

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Questions about the pilot

Please email any questions about the pilot, or your participation, to nleonard@gitlab.com

Providing feedback

Describe any bugs, hiccups, or other problems you encounter in this issue. The more detail you can provide about the context in which you encountered the problem the better!

Please take a look at Known Gaps to see if this is already in development.

What's changed

The new issue experience is built on the work items framework, similar to epics and tasks. In many cases the experience will feel similar as before, aside from some UI differences. Key changes include:

Pilot toggle: You'll see a "New issue look" badge in the top bar, next to the Duo Chat button, when on an issue list or issue detail page. This is where you can toggle the new experience on or off. As part of the pilot we ask you leave this on as much as possible, the ability to turn this off is provided in case you ever get stuck (please let us know when this happens!). This toggle will be removed after the pilot.

  1. Contextual view: Opening an issue from the issue list or board will open the item in a drawer without leaving the list/board. This is similar to the prior board sidebar, but as a complete view of the issue (note: this will also work for epic boards with the toggle enabled). You can open the full view by either clicking the "View in full page" button at the top of the drawer, or by opening the link in a new tab.
  2. Controls: All issue controls, including confidentiality, have moved to the top actions menu, which is also now accessible within the "sticky" header that appears when scrolled.
  3. Sidebar: The sidebar now mirrors the appearance of MRs and Epics, embedded within the page. In smaller views the sidebar content is shown below the description to easily scan all details of the issue.
  4. Ancestry: In addition to the 'Parent' field in the sidebar (previously 'Epic'), you can find the entire hierarchy above the title (requires Premium license or above).
  5. Promote/Change type: You can now change types between Issues, Tasks, Incidents, and Epics, however some UI controls are still in development. You can use the quick action /promote_to epic to promote an issue to an epic, and /type issue or /type task to change between issue/task type.

Continuity with current experience

In general everything you do using the "new look" should be available to all other users, even without the new look enabled. One notable exception is adding a start date to issues, which will only be visible with the new look enabled. Additionally if you start creating an issue using the new look, then disable the new look without creating the issue, the draft will not be available without switching back to the new look.

If you find any areas where data is inconsistent across the two experiences please let us know.

Known gaps

While most features are currently available, a few remain in development. These include but are not limited to:

  • Incidents: Incident support is in development. Disable the toggle to create an incident, or convert an issue using /type incident. Open incidents in the "full view" using the to see all incident controls.
  • AI Features: Description generation are not yet available.
  • Marking as Duplicate: Not yet available.

These features remain available with the toggle disabled, and will be updated throughout the pilot phase.

Edited by Gabe Weaver