Docs

Concepts

tada is simply a kanban board of Stories, with another kanban board of Tasks inside each Story. The vocabulary below is small and deliberate: the same words appear in the board UI, in the MCP tools your agent calls, and in the schema the frontend, API, and MCP server all share.

A kanban board of Stories

The Board View is the kanban board you would expect: four columns, and a card for each Story. A Story is one unit of work. Its column is its status, and dragging it to another column is how its status changes.

A kanban board of Tasks inside each Story

Open a Story and you get the Story Detail View — which is another kanban board, with the same four columns, whose cards are that Story's Tasks. A Task is a unit of work inside a Story, and it moves through those columns exactly the way its parent Story moves through the outer ones.

Status — the four columns, at both levels

Every item, Story or Task, sits in exactly one of these. For a Story it is a Board View lane; for a Task it is a column in its Story's detail view.

1. Idea
2. Planned
3. In Progress
4. Done

The two levels move independently: a Story can be In Progress while some of its Tasks are still Planned — which is exactly what the figures above show.

Type — what kind of work a Story is

Chosen by the nature of the work, not by which part of the app it touches. Only Stories have a type — a Task takes its meaning from the Story it belongs to, which is the one place the two levels are not symmetrical. There are four:

Type and status are independent: a Bug in active development is type Bug, status In Progress. Nothing about being a Bug implies which column it sits in.

“Task” always means a unit of work belonging to a Story — never a Story itself. The maintenance Story type is called Chore precisely so the two words never collide.

The dashboard — what the board looks like from above

Collapse all four lanes and the room they free fills with the board's dashboard: an alert and a handful of panels that answer “what needs a look?” and “how is it going?” without opening a single card. Expand the lanes again and you are back exactly where you were. On a phone, where the lanes stack instead, open the board menu and tap Dashboard: the same panels, one under the other.

• Needs attention, beside the board’s name, names the Stories that are overdue or due in the next week, started but still waiting on a Story that isn’t done, or marked Done with Tasks still open. It shows how many there are and the most urgent kind — ringed in red when something is overdue, amber when something is due within two days — and a click lists them; click one to open it. When nothing needs attention it is a quiet ✓.
• Test trends charts the board’s last 12 uploaded test runs: how many tests ran, how long they took, and whether they passed.
• Shipped per week counts the Stories that reached Done each week, by type, over the last 90, 180 or 365 days.
• Changelog shows a year of shipped Stories, one square per day, and — for the board’s owner — the latest edits to the board alongside.

A panel’s title opens the full page behind it, and Docs ↗ beside the board’s name brings you here.