Boards

The Board surface is a kanban reading of your work items: columns of cards, dragged between columns and reordered inside them.

A column is a stage you define, not a status

This is the point that separates the board from the other surfaces. A column — a stage — is a persisted record you create, name, reorder and delete. It is not one of the values in the status lifecycle, and moving a card between columns does not change an item's status.

A board is created for a scope the first time it is opened, with three ordinary columns — To Do, In Progress, Done — because a board that opens empty teaches nothing and a board that opens with seven columns teaches somebody else's process. They are ordinary stages afterwards: rename them, reorder them, delete them, add your own.

An item is placed on a board by a card. That card is also how an item belongs to a project: an item carries no project field, and "the items in this project" is resolved through project → board → stage → card. See Projects.

Column policies

Each column can carry two policies, both set in the New Column / Edit Column sheet.

Work-in-progress limit

Limit work in progress sets the maximum number of cards the column is meant to hold. It is deliberately advisory: moving a card in that puts the column over its limit stops and asks, naming the limit and the current count, and proceeds if you confirm.

A WIP limit is a commitment a team makes to itself, and a person is allowed to break it knowingly. A hard refusal in the store would also fail machine callers that have no way to answer a question.

Note that a limit of 0 is a real setting and different from having no limit: it describes a column nothing is meant to enter, and it says so when you move a card in. Leaving the toggle off means no limit at all.

Definition of done

Definition of done is what "done" means for that column, in your words. It is shown on the column, and repeated for acknowledgement when a card is moved in.

Neither policy is enforced silently. A move that trips one stops and states its reason until you confirm it; a move that trips neither happens immediately. A move that stays inside the same column asks nothing — it changes neither the count nor the meaning of the column, and prompting for it would only train you to dismiss the prompt.

Ordering

Two different orderings are in play, on purpose.

• Columns are ordered by a dense position, renumbered across the board on every reorder. Columns are few and fully visible, so exact positions are worth more than a cheap insert.
• Cards inside a column are also positioned densely and renumbered across the destination column (and the one they left) on every move, so no neighbour is left holding a stale position and "third card in In Progress" is exactly true.
• Work items generally carry a fractional rank used where a global order is needed, such as reordering within a matrix lane. When two neighbours grow too close to split, the ordering is normalised rather than allowed to collapse.

Cards whose work item has been deleted are dropped from the board rather than drawn as blank rows.

Reading a board from an agent

A connected client can read the same board through the local tools: work_project_list for the projects, work_project_get for one project's boards, and work_board_read for a board as ordered columns of cards with each card resolved to its work item.

These are local tools that answer from this machine's store. They are not a proxy of the Chainabit cloud's board tools and they address unrelated records.

Where to go next

• Work Items — what a card is a card of.
• Projects — the scope a board belongs to, and read-only statuses that refuse board writes.
• Delegation — the Delegate to… action on a card.