Using Google Forms to add Issues

In Backlog, you can add Issues the conventional way — that is by logging in to your Backlog space as a user and adding them — or you can:

Today, I will share one more method: Adding issues using Google Forms.

Google Forms is a free tool for creating online surveys, questionnaires or feedback forms. In order to use Google Forms, you need a Google account. It can be a free Google personal account (like your Gmail account) or a G Suite account.

The benefit of this method is that you can publish your Google Form online to collect responses from the public (for e.g. feedback on your product/service) and then automatically add issues in Backlog and assign them to a member to handle the feedback. Also, anyone can add issues by using the form, without getting access to your Backlog project.

Here’s an overview of the flow:

 

To implement this, the general steps are:

  1. Set up your Backlog project to add issues via email.

  2. Create a Google Form to collect information/responses from people.

  3. Add an add-on to your form to send emails. This will send an email to Backlog when people submit their responses.

Here’s a walkthrough of the setup.

1. First, set up your Backlog project to add issues from email.

Please refer to the post on how to add an email address authorized to add issues. This is necessary because we need to generate an email address in Backlog where responses from the form will be sent to.

2. Create a Google Form.

In this example, I created a feedback form. It will collect email addresses and feedback from respondents.

3. Add an add-on to the form to send emails whenever people submit their answers.

Click on the top-right menu and select “Add-ons”.

Search for “email”. The results will show a list of Add-ons for sending emails. For this example, I used the third result, “Email Notifications for Forms” and added this to the form.

4. Set up the Add-on to send email notifications.

After adding the “Email Notifications for Forms” add-on, click on the jigsaw puzzle icon and select the add-on.

Choose “Create Email Notification”.

Fill in the information accordingly.

Importantly, under “Email Address to Notify”, you need to enter the generated email address from Backlog. (You can refer to that in step 1.)

When you are ready, save the rule. And then click on the top “Eye” icon to preview your form.

5. Test your Google Form in the preview.

I entered some dummy text to test the form.

6. Check the Backlog project

Within a few seconds, a new issue will be added to the respective Backlog project. 

The issue contains the form’s information.

Summary:

Now, you can create your own forms for your needs, then share the form as a url link to your respondents.

Whenever they submit their answers, the Assignee (in Backlog) will be notified and he/she can handle the feedback or inquiries.

I hope you find this tip useful for your Backlog use cases, let me know your thoughts or comments.

And if you have ways to use Backlog with other web services, please share with us!

This really should be part of the base product.

Hi Mark, 

thanks for your suggestion!

 

Can you share more thoughts with us?

Do you mean like a feature to generate an external-facing form for adding issues? 

Yes. Both to add an issue and see existing “community” type issues that are public.

Thank you for sharing, Mark.

 

About seeing issues that are public, that sounds like an open source project platform where the community (or anyone on the net) can see the issues. Do correct me if I got it wrong.

 

Perhaps you mean some issues can be set to public, while some are private?