What everything on a board means

A board makes one claim: this is how the work happens. Everything on it exists to make that claim checkable.

Tracks — who contributes

A track is a contributor, down the left. There are four kinds, and the distinction matters because it decides who can be waiting on something:

Kind	Who that is
person	Someone inside the organisation doing the work
agent	A model doing work on someone’s behalf
system	Software that runs without judgement — a queue, a database, an API
outside	Someone beyond the organisation: a customer, a supplier, a regulator

Jobs — what someone gets

A job is named by what a person has when it is done. Someone is waiting on it, and that someone is a person or an outside party — never a system. “Check it against the order”, not “validateInvoice”.

If only another step waits on it, it is not a job. It is a task inside one.

Each job can carry:

• Intended result — what is different when it is done
• Who needs the result — the person waiting, and what they do with it next
• How you know it is complete — what you would actually check
• Why — the rationale, in the words of whoever explained it

A job with none of these is a draft: Staves keeps it and hands back the questions rather than refusing it.

Tasks — the work inside a job

Tasks belong to a job and can sit on different tracks from it. That is the point: the job “Check it against the order” may contain an agent reading the document, a system matching it, and a person deciding — three tracks, one outcome.

Handoffs — what passes

Handoffs are never drawn directly. They are derived from each job’s inputs and outputs, from its exit targets, and from where a loop goes back. If two jobs are joined on the canvas, it is because the board says so somewhere else — which means the line cannot lie about the flow.

Artifacts are what passes, and they have kinds: document, data, decision, message, record, instruction, measure, other. An artifact marked external came from outside.

Triggers — what starts it

Trigger	Meaning
hand	A person gets to it
ask	Someone asks for it
event	Something arrives
chain	The previous job ends
clock	A schedule
watch	A condition becomes true
deadline	Time runs out
always	It never stops
other	Said in words instead

Trigger is worth arguing about. hand and chain look the same on a canvas and feel completely different to the person waiting: one means when someone gets round to it, the other means immediately.

Gates — where judgement happens

A gate is a decision point: the rule in words, and who is accountable for it — a track, or rule when a rule decides rather than a person. A gate is how a board shows where human judgement is actually required, as opposed to where it merely happens to be.

Status, and what is actually built

Two different things, deliberately kept apart:

• Status — draft until a person signs it off, confirmed after. A confirmed job is never silently redrawn; a re-description comes back as a proposal.
• Implementation — unknown, planned, in-progress, implemented. This is about the code, not the description. It is how a board shows intent without pretending intent has shipped.

Questions and findings

A question is something nobody knows, attached to the job it concerns. A board with no questions usually means something was invented rather than found.

A finding is something Staves noticed: jargon, a job reached from two places, work that produces something and checks nothing.

Stale

A job is stale when the files it was described from have changed since. It does not mean the description is wrong — only that nobody has checked. See picking a board back up.