BriefFlow

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A task is the unit of work in BriefFlow. Every task belongs to a project, has an owner, and can have one or more assignees.

Owner vs. assignee

These are two different roles on the same task, and BriefFlow keeps them distinct on purpose:

  • The owner is accountable for the task overall — typically the manager who requested it. Owners review submitted understanding and are notified of status changes.
  • Assignees are the people actually doing the work. A task can have multiple assignees, and each one submits and tracks their own understanding of the task independently.

One person can be both — a self-owned task still goes through the same understanding and QA workflow.

Creating a task

Creating a task (requires the tasks.create permission — Administrators by default) captures:

  • Project — which project the task belongs to.
  • Title, description, acceptance criteria — what needs to be done and how you'll know it's done.
  • Type — Feature, Bug, Improvement, Testing, Technical, Research, Internal, or Other.
  • Priority — Low, Medium, High, or Critical.
  • Owner and assignees.
  • Due date and estimated effort.
  • QA required — whether this task must pass QA before it can ship. Defaults on.
  • Release required — whether this task must be linked to a release before it's marked Done. Defaults on.

Status

A task moves through a defined sequence — Backlog, Assigned, In Progress, Blocked, Ready for QA, QA In Progress, Changes Requested, Ready for Release, Done — and BriefFlow enforces which moves are valid. Notably, a task can't move into In Progress until every current assignee's understanding of it has been approved — see Understanding.

If a task is blocked, the person marking it blocked records why; that reason is visible to everyone with access to the task.

Comments and activity

Every task has a comment thread (for discussion) and an activity timeline (an automatic, factual record of what happened — status changes, assignment changes, understanding and QA events, release changes). The activity timeline can't be edited; it's the task's audit trail.