There are two main use cases we need to cover. Project Admin and Project Team Member. The main difference between both is that a Project Admin can change a project’s settings. Obviously, one can be a Project Admin on one or two projects and a Team Member on five others, but we will treat both onboarding needs separately.
Important: If you’re new to Taiga and would like to invite your team to the platform, you need to do so after you have created a project. Once you have created a project, you can go to SETTINGS>MEMBERS and add them. Invites will be sent by Taiga to all of them to join both Taiga and your project. If you invite team members that are already Taiga users, they will be immediately added to the project and they will get notified as well.
As a Project Team Member
Whether you got an invitation link or you signed in and were added to a project, the basic question here is, what’s Taiga all about and how can I get my work done?
There are four major Taiga sections you should be aware of. We’ll go from most used to least used, although all are useful in their own ways.
Project view
You can access your assigned projects by clicking on Projects link at the top left of your Taiga screen. You can hover and get an interactive shortlist or click on the link and go to a dedicated page where you can access them as well as rearrange them. Once you have clicked on a project, you access your default view for that project, which is always the Project’s Timeline if you haven’t changed that (we’ll discuss this later under Account Settings).
A simple project timeline with all modules activated
From here you can browse the project’s main modules by taking a look at the sidebar. This sidebar won’t ever get cluttered and it’s split into two sections. The top section lists the active main modules (Epics, Scrum, KANBAN and Issues) while the bottom section show the active secondary modules like Wiki and Meetup as well as the Team section and the General Search feature. You can expand the sidebar if you prefer more explicit navigation information.
How can I add or edit work items?
Chances are that you will either want to create or update a user story, a task or an issue. If you’re using the Scrum module, you simply click on Backlog and create a user story. Afterwards, you can rearrange its priority by simply drag and dropping it.
If you’re using KANBAN, it doesn’t get much more difficult. Go to KANBAN and click on the + button on the column you want the card to be initially placed at (normally, that’s the initial column).
Drag & Drop works as expected throughout Scrum and KANBAN. In Scrum’s Backlog view you will use it mainly to rearrange the backlog’s priorities and also to select one or multiple user stories from the backlog to fit into a open sprint located under the Sprint pane.
Here we use the add to current sprint shoretcut instead of drag & drop. The Sprint burndown was also updated.
We created a single task with the creation dialog but the bulk add option is also handy sometimes.
In KANBAN, drag and drop has the meaning of changing a KANBAN card status and it’s the primary workflow action you can make on a card to advance it to the next stage.
Note how the KANBAN columns’ WIP limits are updated after each card movement.
You can always click on a user story and see its detail view, check its tasks, change title, assigned team members, add comments or simply edit its description.
A user story detail view represents the general approach to detail/edit view for Taiga main entities.
If you are interested in knowing more about how KANBAN or Scrum modules work, be sure to check The 5-min Kanban module overview and the Quick intro to Scrum
Further reading for Issues, Wiki, Epics and Meetup
They all follow the same basic principles. You will quickly find that whether you want to edit a textbox, attach a file or an image, make someone a watcher for an item or simply add comments and quote people, Taiga remains consistent across the board.
You should be ready to visit the guide to Issues as well as the compact walkthrough for Wiki, Epics and Meetup modules.
Dashboard view
Upon login or if you just go to your Taiga instance, you’re confronted with your Taiga dashboard with quick access to your working on items, a list of watched items and shortcuts to your projects. You can always go back to your dashboard by clicking on the Taiga icon on the top bar.
You can hide some items that are not that relevant
Account settings view
What’s a tool without account settings where you can personalise your platform experience? Taiga has very straightforward section for that, just hover your avatar and select Account settings. Besides the usual personal information and password change you get to choose your preference for some automated actions and notifications schemes.
here you see how we went to change our default start page for a project to be the KANBAN view.
Profile view
Taiga has an additional section to get a multiproject view where you can find and list everything that is accessible to you. Simply click on your avatar and you access your personal profile section where you can check from what your personal bio looks like for people that might have access to it to all sorts of information on your activities and relevant content.
One of the many lists and filters under your profile, watched tasks in this case
Further reading
The Frequently Asked Questions is a nice place to go from here but if you’re in the mood of better understanding the dark side of Scrum and KANBAN and how to avoid their potential pitfalls, indulge yourself in the eye-opener 10-min reading that Scrum: The Dark Side and KANBAN: The Dark Side are.
As a Project Admin
Everything we just covered for Team Member applies to you (make sure you go through it) and yet there’s the whole project settings world to explore.
Besides editing the Project Details where you can change the project’s logo, description info and the Public or Private status, there is much more waiting for you when you navigate through the two-tier project settings menu.
A window to Project Settings
Typical first-day project settings changes include role & permissions to accomodate your team’s diverse nature, module activation and workflows adjustments.
The Customisation page here at taiga Resources offers a very hands-on guide to project configuration.
As a Project Owner (creator) you don’t need to do all the customisation heavylifting, you can give Admin status to any team member under SETTINGS > MEMBERS so that they can too help you with the project fine-tuning.
