Work management
Work items
Types, priorities, estimates, hierarchy, comments and the activity trail.
Types are yours
Work item types are rows you maintain, not a fixed list. A team tracking Incident, Change request or Chore should not have to pretend those are bugs. Every organisation starts with a familiar set — epic, story, task, bug, spike, subtask — and can rename, add to or retire any of it.
The name is yours; the level is what the product reads
Each type carries a level, an integer where higher contains lower. That is the only thing hierarchy depends on — which is why inventing your own type costs nothing, and why renaming one breaks nothing.
| Level | Typically | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| 2 | Epic | Holds bodies of work |
| 1 | Story, Feature | A body of work made of tasks |
| 0 | Task, Bug, Incident | The ordinary unit |
| -1 | Subtask | A piece of an ordinary unit |
Level is a number rather than a fixed set of names because depth is your decision. A task inside a story inside an epic is three levels, and no three-value scheme expresses that — nor a fourth level above, if that is how you plan.
What nesting refuses
- A parent below its child. An epic inside a subtask makes a tree unreadable and a roll-up meaningless.
- A loop. An item that ends up inside itself makes every view that walks the tree run forever — a page that hangs rather than an error anybody can read. Nothing prevented this before.
- A chain deeper than anything can draw. A guard, not an opinion.
Two items of the same level may nest
A task under a task is a real way of working and not ours to refuse. Products that enforce more than the rules above are the reason people end up writing hierarchy into titles.
Retiring a type
Turn it inactive rather than deleting it: it drops out of the picker and the work already using it keeps meaning what it meant. Deleting one that is in use is refused. Exactly one type is what new work becomes when nobody picks, and it has to be one people can actually pick.
Estimates
- Story points
- Held as a decimal, because half-points are common and floating-point drift in a velocity chart is a support conversation nobody enjoys.
- Time estimate
- Minutes, like every other duration in the product. Never hours as a fraction.
They are read by different reports, and a missing estimate is never treated as zero anywhere. See Estimates.
Dates that are set for you
Moving an item into a state categorised as in-progress stamps when it started, if it has not started already. Moving it into a done state stamps when it completed; moving it back out clears that. These are derived from the transition rather than typed, so cycle-time figures cannot disagree with the board.
Comments and activity
Comments record who wrote them and when, and mark themselves as edited rather than silently changing. Alongside them, an activity trail records field changes — what moved, from what, to what, and by whom.
The activity trail is not the audit log
Ordinary work-item edits are deliberately not audited. The audit log records the things that would matter in an argument — reading a passport scan, changing somebody's pay, deciding leave — and burying those in a stream of *moved card to In Progress* would defeat it. See Audit, export and erasure.
My work
A single view of everything assigned to you across every project, which is the view the organisation-wide model makes natural: somebody working across four clients has one list rather than four tabs.