YouTrack for Beginners
Used often within development teams, YouTrack needs to be studied in order to be used. Let’s begin!
YouTrack is a project management software developed by JetBrains. It’s in the form of a plugin that can be attached to the JetBrains IDEs such as Intellij Idea, and helps create and assign tasks to a development team as well as track the progress of working.
Overview
First things first, if you prefer a dark theme simply click on your avatar after logging in and change the theme via the button that appears below.
YouTrack works with what we all an Issue. An issue is a task or a initiative. Relating issues are collected together in what we call a Project. Projects have some basic settings and properties like fields and integrations, and each issue inherits these.
To see how to install and set up the YouTrack plugin for the first time, click here.
After you sign in to the YouTrack, go to the Projects tab above and select one of the projects to study. There, on the left you can see your team members working on the same project with you and on the right the sum of the tasks within that project assigned to your team. Make sure to enable the notifications within your browser to see if a new task is opened.
To discuss details about anything relating your project, or to share some important announcements, go to the Knowledge Base tab on the top of the screen. The Knowledge Base section of YouTrack works as a bunch of articles piled up together. Within an article there can be text, media, or even some Google Documents embedded. The Knowledge Base have options like the Public Knowledge Base tab where you can share information that both your team and the third party users like the customers can view the articles from, or the Internal Documentation tab where only the members within your team can access. Or, you can use the Informal tab to keep track of informal communication with your team. If you star an article from the article tab, using the star icon, you can get notifications whenever someone changes or comments on the article.
The Issues tab is there to help you view, manage and create tasks within your team. Want to create a new task? Simply go to Issues tab and click New Issue button and voila! Above, you can see which department or project you are adding the new issue on. To the right of the New Issue tab you can see parameters such as Priority and Type you can add to your newly created issue, to sort them. The Type of the task is basically a blueprint of how the issue must be declared; for example, if you’d like your team members to create an issue that refers to a bug with a screenshot and a code snippet, you can create a blueprint that specifies this via the Type section on the New Issue page. If you create a task under a certain project or team, the members of that team or the collegues that were assigned to that project will be automatically assigned to the new issue.
On the page of each task, you’ll see a link icon above that basically links multiple tasks to one other. This icon can be used to mark a task as a sub-task or parent of, or as that it relates to or even depens on another one. For example, if you don’t want a task to be marked as done before another task that depends on it is done, this relation you’ve set before will come in handy and not allow such thing.
Also on the page of the task, you can determine who can view the issue and change this as you will, as often as you’d like.
To declare to the team members that you are working on a task, or that your task is waiting for verification or that it’s done, simply go to the task page and click on the State tab to the right side.
You can write comments on each issue from under the issue page and even attach files to your comment via the Attach File button. You can even write a comment for someone specific via the @ key and their username.
On the Issues tab, you can determine how to display the issues and sort them via the settings icon to the right. If you prefer to view issues in the Tree Mode, the page will display the relationship between each task as well as the tasks themselves.
You can specify your search via the ribbon above the Issues tab. There, you can view the issues assigned to a certain someone or sort them by priority. You can also save a search via the save button on the search bar.
The Agile Boards tab allows you to see your tasks in the form of a table. Here you can see them organized by the category or the status. If you’d like to see how much time you’ve spent on a task, the comments, the history of your work and the changes you’ve made via an integrated version control system such as Git, simply go on it and scroll down to the icons ribbon.
You can move an issue from the On Progress state to the Completed state via the State Tab, or via the Agile Boards tab by drag and drop method. You can also do this via the IDE you’re using and we are going to explain that method further below.
Using YouTrack via Your IDE
All JetBrains IDEs such as Intellij IDEA, Rider or CLion have a plugin to support issue management. To work with the YouTrack within your team, you need to install the YouTrack plugin on your IDE first. Keep in mind that the YouTrack Plugin works with all the JetBrains IDEs and supports Android Studio too!
After you’ve installed the YouTrack Plugin on your IDE, you need to proceed to Configuration. Assuming you’re working with a team, then we proced to type in the server name such as myTeam.jetbrains.com and type in either the password or the key provided to you via the YouTrack website.
If you’d like to add a specified commit message blueprint, simply go to the Commit Message tab under the server configuration window and create one. You can type in specific words or use variables within curly braces such as {id}, {summary}.
After configuration you are now going to have a YouTrack button to the left below of your IDE. There, you can see the list of issues that match any search query you enter via the Search Bar on the YouTrack IDE window. You can also click on the panel button to the right of the YouTrack window to view details for a selected issue. If an issue is important to you, you can use the pin icon to pin it on a new tab on the YouTrack window.
You can use the arrow button to open the task and via the Open Task window, you can change the status of the task or the branch it’s going to push to.
You can Assign an issue to yourself, change it’s status, add comments and watchers via the Apply Command button within the YouTrack management buttons.
To view and fix the issue, simply go to the version control button to the side of the YouTrack button on your IDE and click on the issue name, which also happens to be a link.
When you’re ready to commit, simply go to the Git tab on top of the project and click on Commit.
You can also change the status of the issue via the commit message here. To do so, simply use the following structure;
#ıssueName To Verify commitMessage
or
#ıssueName Ready commitMessage
