Using Yalla to Squash Software Bugs

This one’s for the programmers.

I don’t have to tell you about the benefits of GitHub. Chances are, if you’ve been coding for more than a few months, you’ve already seen the magic of its version control. Rolling back changes when something goes wrong, collaborating seamlessly – GitHub and the Git software save massive chunks of time. (If you haven’t worked with GitHub yet, check out their getting started guide.)

Our developers use GitHub every day. But the platform’s project management tools are still in their infancy. It takes a lot of time to bounce between GitHub and Yalla, where all of our software roadmaps and team chat take place. Luckily, we can have Yalla create priorities automatically based on what’s taking place in GitHub. That way it’s easy for developers to track their time, reassign priorities and stop wasting time checking two different applications.

That’s the crux of today’s tutorial. We’re going to tie GitHub to Yalla so that any bug noted on the former automatically becomes a priority on the latter. This way you never have to check on your repository for any new issues – they’ll automatically flow to your Yalla board, so you can spend more time coding. (You do like coding, right?)

• • Let’s start with Zapier, which is what we’ll use to help GitHub and Yalla talk to each other. A free account is fine for our purposes. Sign up, then click the orange “Make a Zap!” button at the top of the screen.
  • Choose GitHub as your trigger app – the thing that will spark an action in Yalla. If you’re new to Zapier, you’ll have to give it permission to access your GitHub account.
  • When you’re asked to select your GitHub trigger, scroll down to “New Issue” and choose that. For those of you lucky enough to have no experience with GitHub issues, they’re basically the way users/team members flag bugs in your code.
  • Pick which repository you’d like to watch for issues. For this demo I’m using the repo for a simple tic tac toe game built in JavaScript.
  • Zapier will want to test whether your repo has any open issues. If you’ve never added an issue to a repo (again, lucky you), you can click the “issues” tab underneath the name of the repository on GitHub. Click the green “New Issue” button to add one.
  • Adding an issue is simple – just give it a title and some additional information. Here’s my demo issue for this repo.

• • Head back over to Zapier and click through to test your issue. Mine came through just fine, so we’ll click continue.
  • Now choose Yalla for your Action App. If you don’t have access to Yalla on Zapier, just give us a shout.
  • Choose “Create Priority” as your Yalla action. This means that every time someone adds an issue to your repository, a priority will show up on your Yalla board.
  • Choose your Yalla account, or add it if this is your first time with Zapier. If it asks for your Yalla API key, head over to Yalla and hover over the “Me” link at the top. Then click “Settings,” then “Keys” in the menu that pops up.

• • Time to set up what our priorities will look like. We have a lot of options here, and we can pull from the information included with our GitHub issues. I clicked the box next to the “Title” field and selected the issue’s title. That means that if my GitHub issue is called “navigation bar broken,” the priority created in Yalla will have the same name. I set the priority’s description to the issue body for the same reason.

• • I kept it fairly simple with this Zap, but if you scroll down you’ll see you can tweak your priority in many ways. You can assign issues to a certain user if there’s one person on your team who handles bugs for a given project. Or, if that project is for a client, you can have your Zap add priorities to that client’s board so they know what your team is up to.
  • Click “Continue” to move on. Zapier will want to create a priority to test your Zap – if everything looks right, click “Create and Continue” and let’s see if it worked.

• Check it out! I now have a Yalla priority with the same title and description as my GitHub issue. That was easy.
• Head back to Zapier, click “Finish” and name your Zap. Toggle the “On” switch and you’re done!

Zapier is now watching our GitHub repository for any issues. If you’re on a free Zapier account, there will be a 15-minute lag between when someone adds an issue and when it shows up on your Yalla board. Oh, and this doesn’t just apply to issues you create. I had someone else add an issue to my repo and I still got a priority in Yalla letting me know.

We’re done. Now you can seamlessly fold GitHub issues into your daily workflow and keep everything on Yalla. You can mark how much time you spent on each issue (so you can get paid for your work), and you can reassign bug fixes as needed.

Thanks for reading, and happy coding.