Core concepts
dotby has a small vocabulary. This page defines every word once, so the rest of the docs can use them without stopping to explain.
Read it top to bottom the first time — the order is roughly “biggest thing first”.
Workspace
Section titled “Workspace”Your company. A workspace holds your people, your projects, your settings, and your billing.
Data never crosses between workspaces, so most teams need exactly one. You can belong to several (your own company and a client’s, for example) and switch between them from the sidebar.
Initiative
Section titled “Initiative”An outcome that spans several projects — “Launch v2”, “Enter the EU market”.
An initiative sits above projects: you attach projects to it, and it rolls their progress into one number and one chart. Initiatives can nest, so a large program can contain smaller ones.
Use an initiative when the thing you care about is bigger than any single project. If the work fits in one project, you do not need one.
See Run an initiative.
Project
Section titled “Project”A container of work with its own board, its own statuses, and its own members — a product, a client, a launch, a quarter.
Every project has a key (like WEB) that numbers its tasks: WEB-1,
WEB-2. That number never changes and never gets reused, even if the task is
moved or archived.
A project is also the unit of access. It is either:
- Public — everyone in the workspace can see it. This is the default.
- Private — only the people explicitly added to it can see it, including admins.
One piece of work. This is the thing dotby is really about.
A task belongs to exactly one project and carries as much or as little as you need:
| Property | What it does |
|---|---|
| Status | Where it is in the workflow. Every task always has one. |
| Type | What kind of work it is — Bug, Feature, Chore. Defined per project. |
| Assignee | Who is doing it. |
| Priority | None, Urgent, High, Medium, or Low. |
| Labels | Free-form tags — bug, design, needs-spec. |
| Estimate | How big it is, in points or in time. |
| Due date | When it is needed. |
| Sprint | Which time box it belongs to. |
| Description | Rich text: headings, checklists, code, images, files, mentions. |
| Comments | A threaded discussion, with reactions and @mentions. |
Sub-task
Section titled “Sub-task”A task nested under another task. Use them to break something large into steps that can be assigned separately.
A sub-task is a full task — it has its own number, its own status, and can be found on its own. Changing certain properties on the parent can cascade down to its sub-tasks.
See Break work down.
Relation
Section titled “Relation”A typed link between two tasks that are not parent and child: blocks, blocked by, duplicates, related to.
Use relations to record why work is stuck. Use sub-tasks to record how work breaks down.
See Break work down.
Status
Section titled “Status”A column in the workflow. Every project starts with five — Backlog, Todo, In Progress, Done, Canceled — and you can rename, recolor, reorder, or add your own.
Each status also has a type, and the type is what dotby actually reasons about in charts and rollups:
| Type | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Backlog | Not committed to yet. |
| Unstarted | Committed, not started. |
| Started | In flight. |
| Completed | Finished — counts as done. |
| Canceled | Dropped — excluded from progress, not counted as failure. |
So you can have three “in review”-ish columns of your own, and progress still adds up correctly, because all three are typed Started.
Sprint
Section titled “Sprint”A fixed time box inside a project — a start date, an end date, and the set of tasks committed to it.
While a sprint runs, dotby records a snapshot of it every day, which is what draws the burn-up chart. When you close a sprint, unfinished work does not vanish: you decide where it goes.
Sprints are optional. Plenty of teams run boards without them.
See Plan a sprint.
Module
Section titled “Module”A named workstream inside a project — “Checkout”, “Onboarding”, “Mobile app”.
Where a sprint groups work by when, a module groups it by what part of the product. A module can have its own lead, its own dates, and its own status, and a task can sit in a sprint and a module at the same time.
See Modules.
A saved way of looking at tasks: a layout, plus filters, plus grouping, plus sort order.
Three layouts are available:
- Board — kanban columns. Best for “what is in flight right now”.
- List — a dense table. Best for scanning and bulk edits.
- Timeline — bars on a calendar. Best for “when does this land”.
A view is a real, saved object, not a temporary filter. Create one called “My bugs this sprint”, and it stays in the tab bar for everyone who should see it.
See Projects and views and Filters and search.
A document that lives beside the work — a spec, a meeting note, a runbook.
Pages support the same rich editor as task descriptions, can be organized into folders, and can mention tasks and people so the context is linked, not copy-pasted.
See Pages and wiki.
Whiteboard
Section titled “Whiteboard”An infinite canvas for thinking visually — sketches, flows, architecture, sticky notes. Also lives inside the project.
See Whiteboards.
Channel
Section titled “Channel”Team chat, in the same app as the work. Channels sit next to your projects, so a conversation can point at a task without leaving the tool.
See Team chat for how it works, or the chat feature page for the overview.
A named group of people — Design, Backend, Support.
Teams give you one handle for many humans: mention @design and everyone in it
is notified, without you remembering who is currently on it.
See Teams.
Member and role
Section titled “Member and role”Everyone in a workspace has one role. Each role includes everything below it:
| Role | Can do |
|---|---|
| Admin | Everything, plus workspace settings, billing, and managing members. |
| Manager | Everything a member can, plus managing workspace content. |
| Member | Full access to workspace data — the normal teammate. |
| Guest | No workspace-wide access. Sees only the projects they were added to. |
Guests are for people outside your company: clients, contractors, reviewers. They are free, and they never see anything you did not explicitly share.
Some abilities can also be granted individually — like seeing everyone’s time entries, or everyone’s pay rates — without promoting someone to admin.
Inbox and My Work
Section titled “Inbox and My Work”Two personal surfaces that answer the two questions everyone has every morning:
- Inbox — what changed that involves me: mentions, assignments, comments, status changes on things I follow.
- My Work — everything assigned to me, across every project, in one list.
- Getting started — put these words to use.
- Projects and views — go deeper on layouts, filters, and saved views.
- Glossary — the same words, alphabetically, for when you just need a definition.