Projects Overview

What a project holds in Elixion, how its key works, and who can see it

A project is the unit of work in Elixion, the platform for Engineering Intelligence™. It holds the issues, the cadence, the board and the team, people and agents together, for one initiative.

What a project holds

  • Issues: epics, stories, tasks, bugs, subtasks, spikes and tech debt.
  • Sprints: time-boxed iterations, when the project's methodology uses them.
  • Board: the Kanban view of the work, with the project's own columns.
  • Roadmap: the timeline planning view.
  • Documents: specs, product requirements and other written material.
  • Team: the people on the project and the agents linked to it, with a role each.
  • Settings: General, Board, Integrations, Agents and Team.

Agents are project members

An agent joins a project the way a person does, with a membership row and a role, and it can be an issue assignee. When you create a business project the built-in role agents are linked to it by default, so the assignee list is never empty. You can deselect them at creation, and add or remove agents later from Project Settings > Agents.

See Using Agents.

Project key

Every project has a key, and every issue takes its number from that key:

PAY-123   Issue 123 in the project keyed PAY
CORE-456  Issue 456 in the project keyed CORE

Three things are worth knowing about a key:

  • It is 2 to 10 uppercase letters or digits, and it starts with a letter.
  • It is unique across the whole platform, not just your organization, so a key can be taken by a project you cannot see. The create form tells you when that happens and offers free alternatives.
  • It cannot be changed after the project exists. Choose it deliberately at creation.

See Creating Projects.

Project status

| Status | Meaning | |--------|---------| | Planning | The default for a new project | | Active | Currently being worked on | | On Hold | Paused. The projects index lists these under Paused | | Completed | Work finished | | Archived | Kept for reference |

Status is a label you set in Project Settings > General. It changes how the project is filed on the projects index; it does not lock the project or stop work in it.

Who can see a project

Access is decided by project membership, plus one project-level switch.

  • Members of a project can see it, and what they can do in it depends on their role.
  • The project owner always has full access.
  • A project marked public is viewable by any member of the project's organization, whether or not they are a member of the project. Public means public inside your organization, never outside it.

The public switch is offered when you create a project and can be changed afterwards on the project's edit page.

For the full role and tier model, see Permissions.

The projects index

Projects in the sidebar lists every project you can reach as a grid of cards, with tabs for All, Active, Planning, Paused and Archived, and a search box that matches on name.

Other ways in:

  • The workspace rail switches which workspace, and therefore which project, is current.
  • The command palette (⌘K) finds a project by name or key.
  • Star a project to keep it in Favorites.

Settings that change how a project behaves

Beyond name and status, a project carries settings that the board, the charts and the planner all read:

  • Methodology, sprint length in weeks, and release frequency.
  • Story point scale and velocity baseline.
  • Working days and definition of ready.
  • Auto-archive for Done issues after a number of days.
  • Repository URL, documentation URL and Slack channel.

See Project Settings.

Naming projects

Keep names specific enough to tell two projects apart at a glance.

Good: "User Authentication Service", "Mobile App, iOS", "Q1 Marketing Site".

Less useful: "Project 1", "misc", "stuff to do".

Related

Next: Creating Projects.