Printing out GitHub issues for triage or estimation

On one of the projects I’ve been working on at mySociety had a large number of open issues, most of which hadn’t been looked at for some time, and didn’t have estimates of difficulty. To address this we tried a variation of an exercise that’s suggested in “The Scrum Field Guide” in the chapter called “Prioritizing and Estimating Large Backlogs”, which involves printing out all the stories in the product backlog onto index cards and arranging them on a wall roughly in order of difficulty from left to right. (A second stage is to let the product owner adjust the height of each story on the wall to reflect its priority.) It seemed as if this might be a helpful way of estimating our large number of open issues, even though they’re not written as users stories.

An obvious problem here was that we didn’t have an easy way of GitHub tickets en masse, so I wrote a script that would generate a PDF for each open issue (excluding those that are pull requests) in a repository’s issue tracker using Pandoc. That script is here in case it’s of use to anyone:

As it turned out, this session was pretty successful – as well as the value of generating lots of difficulty estimates, it was a good way of getting a picture of the history of the project, and starting lots of discussions of issues that only one member of the team knew about.


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5 responses to “Printing out GitHub issues for triage or estimation”

  1. Tom Steinberg Avatar
    Tom Steinberg

    Out of interest, how *big* is each issue? If it’s just one line does it take one piece of paper?

    1. mark Avatar

      Yeah, I’m afraid if the issue is just a title, for example, the PDF for that issue will be largely empty space. (That’s fixable, of course, but this was just a quick hack.)

  2. Tom Steinberg Avatar
    Tom Steinberg

    Once this is done, I can recommend this page to help print them:
    http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4075

  3. Bogdan Avatar

    Hi, I am trying to firuge out how to get this to work on the background element.I would like the body{background-image: url(blablah.jpg);} to have a background image that behaves the same way this does in a div.Can anyone help me with this? I tried: $( body’).anystretch( img01.jpg ); but it does not work right. The image has a padding applied and if there is not enough content to fill the screen the image disappears.

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