Monday sprint board from your issue tracker

A product team plans the week on Monday morning, and the plan lives in an issue tracker few people enjoy looking at. This example builds a visual sprint board from the open issues instead: one section per squad, each with a kanban whose columns are Backlog, In progress, In review and Done. The link goes to the team's Slack channel.

Download the code (Node.js 18 or later, no packages)

What it creates

• A board titled "Sprint board, week of" and the Monday's date.

• A section for each squad, holding a kanban with one card per issue: the issue number and title, assignee, labels and priority.

• A message in Slack with the board's link, when a Slack incoming webhook is set.

How it works

1. Read the open issues: from issues.sample.json, or from GitHub when GITHUB_REPO is set, with squads and statuses taken from labels such as squad:Checkout and status:In review.

2. Create the board with POST /boards. The week is the Idempotency-Key, so running it twice on the same Monday returns the same board.

3. Draw every section and kanban in one go with a batch, POST /boards/{boardId}/items:batch, which takes up to 100 operations and answers with a job.

4. Post the board's url to Slack.

Run the example

Create an API key in the developer console with the scopes user:read and boards:write, then:

cp .env.example .env        # paste your key into .env
node sprint-board.js

To run it every Monday at 8:00, add it to cron or to a scheduled CI job:

0 8 * * 1 cd /path/to/sprint-board && node sprint-board.js

The key code

const board = await mf.post('/boards', { title: `Sprint board, week of ${week}` }, { idempotencyKey: `sprint-${week}` });

const operations = [];
squads.forEach((squad, i) => {
  const y = i * 1000;
  operations.push({ op: 'create', item: { type: 'section', position: { x: 0, y }, size: { width: 1800, height: 900 }, data: { title: squad } } });
  operations.push({ op: 'create', item: { type: 'kanban', position: { x: 40, y: y + 80 }, data: kanbanFor(squad) } });
});
await mf.batch(board.id, operations);

Adapt it

• Jira, Linear, Asana or Trello: replace githubIssues() with a call to that tool's API; the board part stays the same.

• Support teams: open tickets by queue, with a column per status.

• Content teams: this week's articles by channel, from the editorial calendar.

What you need

An API key with user:read and boards:write. Every plan; Basic makes three boards in total, so on Basic delete last week's board before the next run.