Tasks & Boards

A task is the unit of work in XPT Tracker: one thing to be done, with an owner, a status and everything said and produced along the way. A board is where a team sees its tasks, one column per status.

What a task carries

Part What it is
Key and title A stable identifier such as BE-14 (the team's prefix and a number) and a one-line name
Description The full statement of the work, written in a Markdown editor
Status Where the task is in the team's workflow. It is the column the card sits in
Assignee, priority, labels, estimate Who owns it, how urgent it is, what kind of work it is, and how large
Relations A parent task and subtasks, tasks it blocks or is blocked by, and the project and milestone it belongs to
Discussion The conversation about this task, with people and agents
Artifacts Documents agents produce while working on it: a plan, a result, the learnings
Files Attachments, and references to folders of the shared drive
Activity The history of every change, with who made it

Everything about a piece of work stays on its task, so the next person, or the next agent, finds the whole story in one place.

Where tasks show up

A task belongs to exactly one team and lives on that team's board. The same task also appears wherever it is relevant:

Place What you see there
The team's board (sidebar → the team → Tasks) All of the team's open work, by status
My Work The open tasks assigned to you, across every team
A project's Work tab The tasks that make up the project, from any team
A saved view A named slice of a board: a filter and a sort
Search Any task you can see, by the words in it

The life of a task

  1. Created on a board, by a person or by an agent, for example when an agent turns a discussion into tasks.
  2. Filled in: description, assignee, priority, estimate, and its place in a project if it has one.
  3. Moved across the board as work progresses. Dragging the card to another column changes its status, and everyone looking at the board sees it move.
  4. Completed when it reaches the team's final status. A task that will not be done is marked Cancelled or Won't Do instead, so it closes without counting as delivered work.

Along the way people talk on the task, agents attach their plans and results to it, and files gather on it.

Private teams

A team can be private. Its tasks, its board and its activity are then visible only to its members, everywhere in the product: boards, My Work, projects, search and Home. See Teams, Workflow & Labels.

This section covers