Reference 0001 · Glossary
The canonical terms for the merge decision in MISSION.md. Every lesson in this workspace uses these words and no others.
An entry is here because it earns its place in a decision, not because it is a dictionary item. Each definition says what the thing is, never how to do it. Where the wider industry uses a word loosely, the resolution is stated under Avoid — that line is binding.
The one distinction that carries the whole lesson: a work item has an owner, a status, and a life. A timebox has a window, a goal, and a membership question. They are different kinds of thing and they are not siblings.
Container
Sprint: A fixed timebox that contains work, not a work item itself. It has a start, an end, a goal, and a membership question ("which items were in this window?"). It has no owner and no per-item status. _Avoid_: Task, ticket, phase, milestone, "iteration of tasks"
Sprint Goal: The single qualitative objective a Sprint commits to. The normative commitment in the 2020 Scrum Guide, and deliberately not a number. _Avoid_: Sprint commitment, sprint target, "the promise"
Sprint Backlog: Sprint Goal (why) + the selected items (what) + the developers' plan (how). The plan is owned by the Developers and is expected to change as they learn. _Avoid_: Sprint tasks, sprint scope lock
Product Backlog: An emergent, ordered list of everything that might improve the product. The single source of work. "Backlog" as used bare in this workspace means this, not the set of tasks that happen to have no sprint. _Avoid_: Task list, todo list, queue
Estimation
Story Point: A relative size, on a Fibonacci scale, assigned by the Developers as a judgment of effort + uncertainty + complexity together. Its only property is ordinal: 8 is bigger than 5 to this team. It is not hours, not currency, and not a productivity measure. _Avoid_: Hours, days, "effort", t-shirt size that implies hours
Velocity: An observed rolling rate at which a team converts its own relative sizes into finished increments. Emergent, team-specific, and never committed to. Used to forecast, never to compare teams or individuals. _Avoid_: Throughput (different thing), points per sprint as a KPI, "productivity"
Commitment (Scrum sense): A quality bar attached to an artifact — Product Goal, Sprint Goal, Definition of Done. The 2020 Guide uses "commitment" only in this qualitative sense. _Avoid_: Committed points, committed scope, "commitment" meaning a promise of a count. Flag: this workspace never uses "committed" for a number.
Work item:
Any row in public.tasks. This table is the platform-wide unit of
assignable work: it backs /tasks, /pm/*, capacity,
timesheets and performance goals. It is deliberately shape-agnostic —
status_column is free text.
_Avoid_: Ticket, issue, card — they imply a status model this table does not have
Action Required:
The person whose response currently unblocks an item, as distinct from its
owner who is responsible for delivering it. A real concept in
GoodDay-style PM; currently faked in this repo, because
tasks has no action_required_id column.
_Avoid_: Assignee (a different concept — a set, not a single blocking party)
Milestone:
A dated, named checkpoint on a project (project_milestones). The
one thing in this repo that genuinely is a milestone in the classic sense.
_Avoid_: Sprint — see the anti-synonym below
Binding anti-synonym. In this workspace a Sprint is
not a milestone and a Milestone is not a Sprint. A milestone
is a point; a sprint is a window. A sprint may terminate at a
milestone (pm_sprints.milestone_id exists for exactly this), but
conflating them is the single most common way this schema gets designed
wrong.
Capacity (this repo):
Always measured in hours per week, derived in
capacity.service.ts as base capacity − holidays − approved leave, then
compared against allocations + task estimates + logged timesheet hours. Never in
points.
_Avoid_: capacity_points as if it were this
Workload status:
One of OVERALLOCATED, OPTIMAL,
UNDERALLOCATED, BENCH, computed by the capacity service.
The only utilisation judgement in the platform that is grounded in real HR data.
_Avoid_: "health" gauges, which are hardcoded
Measure of effectiveness (MoE): A direct measure of the thing you actually want — hard to measure, hard to manipulate. Effortful features shipped, bugs avoided. _Avoid_: Score, points
Measure of performance (MOP): A cheap proxy that correlates with the MoE — easy to measure, easy to game. Story points completed, tasks closed, commits per day. _Avoid_: Metric (too neutral a word to carry the distinction)
Cycle time: Elapsed time from work starting to work being done. The flow-native alternative to velocity: it needs no estimation at all, so it cannot be gamed by re-pointing your tickets. _Avoid_: Lead time (different — includes queue wait before start)
Terms deliberately excluded so they cannot leak into reasoning: kanban, Gantt, burndown, epic. All three of the first are view concerns, not domain objects — see the lesson's verdict on where they belong. Epic is excluded because no such table exists in this schema; using the word implies a structure that was never built.