Waffle can be confusing to look at if you’re not familiar with the tool, terms and ‘agile development’. There’s not been strictly a set way decided on how to use it, so there’s no fault of yours for it coming across as a mess, so here’s some pointers:
You can log into waffle with your github account.
What you see are boxes representing each ‘issue’ that exists on github.
The vertical columns are meant to help represent what state the issue is in. When it’s in the backlog, that usually means that it’s not being thought about, that it’s waiting to be prioritised.
When it’s in the ready column, it means it wants someone to pick it up and start working on it.
When it’s in the “in progress” column, someone’s working on it.
When it’s on the ‘done’ column, it’s finished with.
Done isn’t the same as Ready.
Dragging and dropping boxes basically is a quick way of setting labels on it in github that reflect these states, throwing it into the ‘done’ column sets the issue as closed and removes the labels, removing it from this column re-opens the issue.
You can comment on the issues from waffle, rather than going to github, and you can allocate it to people from waffle too.
And I think more significantly, is this going to be useful to us in the longer term, especially when we have more people involved (and, inevitably, fewer people actually doing anything)? It seems like it requires more knowledge of more tools which people may not necessarily have.
I’ve not used github projects so I’m not clear on what the learning curve is there either. The original offered choice was between waffle and Trello.
Waffle won, a decision that was largely ignored (we carried on using Trello)until fairly recently. We attempted reopening the choice (which resulted in a strong preference for Trello) but somewhere a decision was made to go with our original decision. i remain to be convinced that this was the right thing to do as I have subsequently seen a fair amount of grumbling about it even from those familiar with agile.
Does github projects:
work on mobile
allow for the creation of gannt charts
allow for dependencies to be shown
allow labels to be changed to things which are more meaningful?
If so, this may be a solution for those of us struggling with waffle (I have given up and am using github issues with email notifications). If not we may have to reopen the issue.