Glossary

Every word this section uses that does not mean what you would guess.

The things work is made of

Item. One piece of work. The unit everything else groups, moves or counts. An item has a kind, a status, a priority, optionally an assignee, and a history of who changed it.

Kind. What sort of thing an item is: issue, bug, chore, epic or milestone. It changes what the item is for, not what can be done to it.

Epic. An item big enough that other items hang under it. A phase of work. The Epics screen shows how far through each one is.

Milestone. A date with a name, not a task. It has to carry a due date and nothing hangs under it. Milestones are drawn in their own strip along the top of the timeline.

Reference. The short name an item is called by, like WM-4: the project’s key and a number. It appears once the project has a key, which is set on Settings › Reference key. Setting one numbers every card the project already had, oldest first.

Where work sits

Board. The columns a project’s work is drawn in. Stages are what a project chooses to draw; the seven statuses underneath are what agents read and reports count.

Project. A board’s worth of work, and the wall around it. A project belongs to an organisation, is created on the org chart, and holds no other groups inside it. Membership of a project is what lets somebody read its board.

Status. Which of the seven states an item is in: Backlog, Ready, In progress, In review, Blocked, Done, Cancelled. The same seven everywhere, because the same seven are what agents read and reports count.

Stage. A column a project chooses to draw, folded onto one of the seven statuses. A team that works in “Design review” gets that column; everything else still reads the status under it. Set on Settings › Stages.

Sprint. A named stretch of days the project committed to. Work is dragged into it, it runs, and closing it asks where the unfinished work goes.

Carry-over. What closing a sprint does with the work that did not finish: into the next sprint, into another planned one, or back to the backlog. Carried work keeps the order it had.

Label. A free tag on an item, from a per-project list. Labels can be filtered on.

Swimlane. Grouping the board’s rows by epic or by assignee instead of drawing one row of columns.

Deciding things

Plan. A record of a decision: what is being done, why now, links to the pages the thinking lives on, and the phases it breaks into. Not a document editor. Signing one off creates its epics.

Phase. A stage inside a plan. Each phase becomes an epic when the plan is signed off.

Signoff. The gate on a plan. Approving it mints the epics and the first phase’s items, all in one step, and marks the plan active. The plan’s author can never be the one who signs it off.

Mint. What a signoff does: create the epics and items a plan describes, each remembering which plan made it.

Review gate. The stop between a card being finished and being Done. An item marked as needing review goes to In review instead, and waits for somebody other than the person who asked. An agent is never the one who decides.

Needs review. The tick on an item that turns the gate on for it. Epics and milestones arrive with it on; everything else arrives with it off.

Reviewer role. Which role has to decide the review, pm unless changed. The people who can decide are the project’s owner, admin or pm, and anybody who administers the instance.

Project role. Owner, admin, pm or advisor, held at one project and granted on Settings › People. It says what somebody may do on that board.

Instance write. The separate, instance-wide permission to write work at all, shown beside each person on Settings › People. work-contributor covers reading and writing items; work-manager adds sprints and columns. A project role without it is a role whose buttons are all refused.

Machines

Agent. A worker in Neutron that can be a member of a project and an assignee on an item. It reads the board through its own tools and is stopped by exactly the rules a person is stopped by.

Ready. The state that means a piece of work can be picked up: status Ready, nobody assigned, nothing blocking it. “Ready for agents” is the list of them.

Claim. Taking a ready item. It goes to In progress with the claimer’s name on it, and a second attempt is refused rather than overwriting the first.

Links

Linked item. Another item this one is tied to, by one of four kinds: blocks, precedes, relates to, duplicates. Only blocks stops anything.

Linked card. A card another project owns, drawn on your board with a dashed border because it is connected to your work. You can read it. You cannot move it.

Code-host link. An address pointing at a GitLab or GitHub issue this item is about. One way: moving the card writes a neutron: label onto the issue, and nothing on the issue changes the card.

Tracker of record. The place the truth lives. That is Neutron. An issue on a code host is told where the work got to and is never read back, so there is no second copy to keep in step.

Elsewhere in Neutron

Approval. The durable row a decision waits on, used by the review gate, by plan signoffs, and by every other gate in Neutron. It is why a review shows on your bell beside everything else waiting on you.

Notification. A row raised when somebody mentions you, assigns you something, decides a review you asked for, or signs off your plan. It clears when you open the item.

Organisation. The node a project hangs off, created and managed on the org chart.