The decision and the ticket are in different products
The reason a task exists was a conversation. The task is a title and two lines written afterwards. Whoever picks it up later gets the two lines.
Use case · engineering
The card remembers the conversation that caused it
Enclessa keeps engineering work and the discussion about it in one product: GitHub issues and pull requests sync onto boards, the check rollup and review decision appear on the card, and every card carries a link back to the channel and message the work came out of. Boards belong to a team and inherit its roles, so there is no second permission model to administer, and the API, webhooks and slash commands cover the tooling the connector does not.
Open betaThe platform is being built in the open, so parts of it are not there yet, behaviour changes between releases, and no availability figure is committed while it is in beta. What is still being built.
At a glance
- Source of truth
- GitHub for code, Enclessa for the work and the talking
- Sync
- Issues and pull requests, in both directions when enabled
- On the card
- Check rollup, review decision, the linked pull request
- Provenance
- A card links back to the message it came from
- Permissions
- Boards inherit the team’s roles
- Needs
- The Boards and GitHub modules — the Team plan
The situation
A team ships software. The code is in GitHub, the planning is in a project tool, the conversation is in a chat product, and the relationship between the three exists only in the heads of the people who were present. Every question of the form "why is this like this" is answered by somebody remembering, or not.
What goes wrong when this is spread across four products
The board is a second, worse copy of the repository
Issues are duplicated as cards and then maintained twice, which lasts about three weeks. After that the board is decoration and the standup is spent asking what is actually happening.
A second permission model to keep in step
The project tool has its own idea of who is in which project, drifting steadily away from who is in which team, and audited by nobody.
Checking the build means leaving
Whether the pull request attached to this work is green is a question that requires opening another tab, which means it gets asked less often than it should.
How Enclessa handles it
Put the team, its channels and its board in one place
A board belongs to a team and uses that team’s roles, so the people who can see the channel are the people who can see the work. There is no separate project membership to maintain and no chance of the two disagreeing.
Connect the repository once, at the organisation level
An administrator makes one connection with a GitHub App or a personal access token, and it covers GitHub.com or GitHub Enterprise Server. Somebody who may manage boards then links a specific board to a repository, a Projects v2 project, or both.
Map the columns to the project status
Board columns map onto the Status field of a GitHub Projects v2 project, so moving a card and moving a project item mean the same thing rather than two things that have to be reconciled.
Let pull requests attach to the work they finish
A pull request that closes an issue attaches to that issue’s card instead of becoming a second card, and the card shows the check rollup and the review decision. Whether the work is ready is visible from the board.
Decide deliberately whether Enclessa may write back
Write-back to GitHub is a per-organisation setting. Leave it off and the connector reads; turn it on and moving a card moves the project item. Either way it is a decision somebody made rather than a default that surprised them.
Create work from the conversation that produced it
When a discussion in a channel turns into work, make the card from the message. The link back survives, so the next person to read the card can read the argument behind it, and a card can be filed as a new GitHub issue from here.
Which plan this needs
Boards and the GitHub connector are both on the Team plan and above, and GitHub requires Boards because the things it syncs are board cards. Webhooks, slash commands, bot accounts and API tokens are on the same plans. The channels and threads work on any plan.
Compare the plansWhat this will not do
- GitHub only. There is no GitLab, Bitbucket, Azure DevOps or Jira connector, and none is planned that could be relied on.
- Enclessa does not host code, run pipelines or review diffs. It shows the state of work that lives in GitHub.
- Boards have no dependencies, sub-items, automation rules, cross-board views or reporting charts. These are deliberately absent and will stay absent.
- There is no event stream out of the platform, so tooling that wants to react to something happening in Enclessa has to poll for it.
- Boards are a module, off until an operator switches them on. With boards off, every GitHub route answers 404 rather than half-working.
Where the detail is
GitHub syncWhat crosses between the repository and the board, and in which direction.Read moreTask boardsBoards that inherit team roles and link back to the conversation.Read moreEngineering teamsThe same ground, read as a sector rather than a task.Read moreThe APIFor the tooling the connector does not cover.Read more
Questions
Engineering work in one place: common questions
Does Enclessa replace GitHub?
No. Code, pull requests and pipelines stay in GitHub. Enclessa syncs the issues and pull requests onto a board, shows the check rollup and review decision on the card, and keeps the conversation about the work in the same product.
Can a task link back to the conversation it came from?
Yes. A board card carries a link to the channel and the message the work came out of, which is the part a separate project tool cannot do.
Do boards need their own permissions?
No. A board belongs to a team and inherits that team’s roles, so the people who can see the channel are the people who can see the work, and there is no second permission model to keep in step.
Will moving a card change our GitHub repository?
Only if the organisation has switched write-back on. It is a deliberate per-organisation setting; with it off, the connector reads from GitHub and never writes to it.
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