6.1. GitHub Projects and Layouts
A single issue tells you about one task; GitHub Projects exists to show many of them at once, organized however a team actually thinks about its work.
💡 First Principle: GitHub Projects is a flexible planning surface that pulls in issues, pull requests, and standalone draft items — from one repository or many — and displays them in whichever layout fits the question being asked. A board (columns like To Do / In Progress / Done) suits a kanban-style workflow. A table suits filtering and bulk-editing many items with custom fields. A roadmap suits viewing work against a timeline. The same underlying items can be viewed in more than one layout at once, because the layout is a view of the data, not the data itself.
⚠️ Exam Trap: A GitHub Project is not scoped to a single repository the way an issue is — it can pull in items from multiple repositories at once, which is exactly what makes it useful for tracking cross-repository initiatives.
Reflection Question: A team wants to see the same set of tasks as a kanban board for daily standups and as a table for a Friday status report. Do they need two separate Projects to get both views?
