Projects: Auto-add item to project automation

[github-product-roadmap]

Summary

As teams continue to onboard and use Projects, there is a need to allow more flexible and comprehensive automations or workflows that allow project users to automate more repetitive items they have to do by hand currently.

With this new built-in workflow, users will be able to automatically add issues and PRs from repositories when certain conditions are met. This will allow maintainers to spend less time chasing down items that need to be added to projects and cut back on instances where an item should have been added to a project but was inadvertently missed. Additionally, this should ease the amount of effort needed to populate a board in its early stages.

NOTE: Designs are still evolving and the final product may look different upon shipping.

Intended Outcome

Users can create configure a templated workflow that will automatically add items to their project board when specific filter criteria are met. For example, when an issue is opened in repository {X} and has label {Y}, add the issue from the project.

Our hope is that this feature will address feedback we've gotten around

1. Initial propagation of items with a project -- making it easier to add many items at once to onboard to a project
2. Reducing overhead / maintenance required to keep a project up to date as new issues and PRs are created across various relevant repositories
3. Providing a built-in project specific workflow to automate this task rather than pushing towards user-managed Actions that must be managed separately from the project context

How will it work?

In the Workflows page, we will introduce a new built-in workflow called "Auto-add items". The user will specify the set of conditions/filters they want to use to select which items across the organization should be added to the project. Whenever an item meets that criteria, the workflow will automatically add the item.

While users will only be able to set up one add automation to begin with, we expect to allow them to clone/duplicate archive workflows to capture all the various states where they'd like an item added. For example, users should be able to create a workflow for each repo they need to add items from or perhaps issue specific criteria that may not apply to PRs that need to be auto-added.

[ankneis]

🚢 This has shipped to dotcom: https://github.blog/changelog/2023-01-19-github-issues-january-19th-update!

Leaving open to track for GHES release!

[ankneis]

Closing as this shipped to GHES 3.9: https://github.blog/2023-06-29-github-enterprise-server-3-9-is-now-generally-available/