Work items

Work items are the core elements for planning and tracking work in GitLab. Planning and tracking product development often requires breaking work into smaller, manageable parts while maintaining connection to the bigger picture. Work items are designed around this fundamental need, providing a unified way to represent units of work at any level, from strategic initiatives to individual tasks.

The hierarchical nature of work items enables clear relationships between different levels of work, helping teams understand how daily tasks contribute to larger goals and how strategic objectives break down into actionable components.

This structure supports various planning frameworks like Scrum, Kanban, and portfolio management approaches, while giving teams visibility into progress at every level. With work items, you can organize your team’s work using common structures that support various planning frameworks including Scrum, Kanban, and portfolio management approaches.

Work item types

GitLab supports the following work item types:

• Issues: Track tasks, features, and bugs.
• Epics: Manage large initiatives across multiple milestones and issues.
• Tasks: Track small units of work.
• Objectives and key results): Track strategic goals and their measurable outcomes.
• Test cases: Integrate test planning directly into your GitLab workflows.

View all work items

To organize work items (like issues, epics, and tasks) side-by-side, use the consolidated work items view. This view helps you understand the full scope of work, and prioritize effectively.

When you enable this feature, it:

• Removes Plan > Issues and Plan > Epics from the left sidebar in groups and projects.
• Adds Plan > Work items to the left sidebar.
• Pins Work items on the left sidebar for projects and groups, if you had previously pinned Plan > Issues or Plan > Epics.

Prerequisites:

• In the Free tier, your administrator must enable the flag named namespace_level_work_items.
• In the Premium and Ultimate tiers, your administrator must enable the flag named work_item_epics.

To view work items for a project or group:

1. On the left sidebar, select Search or go to and find your project or group.
2. Select Plan > Work items.

Filter work items

On the Work items page, you can use filters to narrow down the list:

1. At the top of the page, from the filter bar, select a filter, operator, and its value.
2. Optional. Add more filters.
3. Press Enter or select the search icon .

Available filters

These filters are available for work items:

• Assignee
  • Operators: is, is not one of, is one of
• Author
  • Operators: is, is not one of, is one of
• Confidential
  • Values: Yes, No
• Label
  • Operators: is, is not one of, is one of
• Milestone
  • Operators: is, is not
• My reaction
  • Operators: is, is not
• Search within
  • Operators: Titles, Descriptions
• State
  • Values: Any, Open, Closed
• Type
  • Values: Issue, Incident, Task, Epic, Objective, Key Result, Test case

To access filters you’ve used recently, on the left side of the filter bar, select the Recent searches ( ) dropdown list.

Sort work items

Sort the list of work items by the following:

• Created date
• Updated date
• Start date
• Due date
• Title

To change the sorting criteria:

• On the right of the filter bar, select the Created date dropdown list.

To toggle the sorting order between ascending and descending:

• On the right of the filter bar, select Sort direction ( or ).

For more information about sorting logic, see Sorting and ordering issue lists.

Related topics

• Linked issues
• Linked epics
• Issue boards
• Labels
• Iterations
• Milestones