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Projects and views

A project holds the work. A view decides how you look at it.

This guide covers the three layouts, how to shape one with filters and grouping, and why saving a view is worth the ten seconds it takes.

Set up the project

Section titled “Set up the project”

Two things are worth deciding early, because everything else is easy to change later.

The key. Every project has a short key — WEB, API, MOB — and every task in it is numbered from that key: WEB-1, WEB-2. People will type those numbers in chat, in commits, and in pull request titles for years. Keep them short and obvious.

The statuses. Every project starts with Backlog, Todo, In Progress, Done, and Canceled. Rename them to match how your team really talks. A support team might want “Waiting on customer”. A design team might want “In review”.

When you add a status, you also pick its type — Backlog, Unstarted, Started, Completed, or Canceled. The name is for humans; the type is what charts and progress bars count. Three columns of your own can all be typed Started, and every rollup still adds up correctly.

Keep Canceled. Dropping work on purpose is a real outcome, and dotby keeps canceled tasks out of your progress numbers instead of counting them as failures.

Pick a layout

Section titled “Pick a layout”
Layout Best for
Board What is in flight right now. Drag cards between columns.
List Scanning a lot of work, and changing many tasks at once.
Timeline When things land. Bars on a calendar, with dependencies visible.

They are three views of the same tasks, not three copies. A change in one shows up in the others immediately, for everyone.

Board

Section titled “Board”

Columns are your statuses by default. Drag a card to move it, or hover it and press S.

You can group by something other than status — by assignee to see who is loaded, by priority to see what is actually urgent.

List

Section titled “List”

A dense table, one task per row. This is where bulk work happens: select several rows and change status, assignee, sprint, or labels for all of them in one go.

You can also choose which columns to show, so a list can be as narrow as “title and status” or as wide as your whole property set.

Timeline

Section titled “Timeline”

Tasks as bars across a calendar, grouped into lanes. Use it to answer “does this fit before the launch?” rather than “who is doing what today”.

Filter, group, sort

Section titled “Filter, group, sort”

Any layout can be narrowed. The common ones:

  • Status — hide everything that is already done
  • Assignee — just my work, or just one person’s
  • Priority — urgent and high only
  • Labels — everything tagged bug
  • Sprint or module — one time box, or one workstream

Filters combine, and the result is what you see and what you bulk-edit.

Save the view

Section titled “Save the view”

Here is the part teams skip, and then regret.

A view in dotby is a real saved object — layout, filters, grouping, sort, and visible columns, all together, under a name. Save it once and it appears as a tab at the top of the project for the people who should see it.

Good views to make on day one:

  • This sprint — current sprint, not done, grouped by status
  • Bugs — label bug, sorted by priority
  • Needs review — status In Review, grouped by assignee
  • Unassigned — no assignee, not done

The payoff is that nobody re-builds the same filter every morning, and “where do I look?” has one answer instead of six.

Next

Section titled “Next”