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Concepts

tada is a kanban board — and then it is a kanban board again, one level down. Understanding that nesting is most of understanding tada. 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.

The board is a 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.

Each Story is itself a board of Tasks

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.

That is the whole shape: a board inside a board. The outer board's items are Stories; each Story's inner board holds Tasks. One vocabulary, applied at two levels — which is why the four statuses below mean the same thing wherever you meet them.

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.