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reading the board

the board at / lists every tracked spec as a card in the lane its status puts it in. what the statuses mean and how a spec moves between them is in the spec lifecycle. this page covers reading the page itself.

lanes and cards

five lanes: Draft, Ready for review, In review, Approved, Implemented. the Implemented lane stays closed until Show implemented in Filters is ticked, so the board shows work in flight by default. Board and List beside the heading switch the layout.

a card puts its review state below the title: an approval count whose tooltip names the reviewers it is waiting on, one unresolved count for open comment threads and pending suggestions (the tooltip breaks it down), a Stale marker after STALE_DAYS without a change, and a "changed since N approvals" link to the comparison.

the line below groups the project and area, spec and revision pull requests, milestone, implementers, author and last change time. possible conflicts with other specs reported by a review bot sit here too; they are advisory and never block approval. actions live in the card menu, including the spec's planning panel and, for a project approver or board admin, setting its milestone without leaving the board.

finding specs

the filter box narrows the cards already on the page as you type; enter asks the board for the full text of every spec instead. Filters holds the rest: project, milestone and implementer reload the board, while stage and author-or-reviewer filter the page you have. My specs and To review use the account signed in to the board, or your editor account when you are not signed in to the board. each filter in force shows as a token in the toolbar, and clicking it off removes it.

the project filter includes only specs assigned to that project, including its top-level specs. choose All projects to see specs from other projects.

stage, the person filter, the layout, the chips and Show implemented are kept in your browser and written into the page address, so a link you copy shows the board as you left it. the board's /privacy page lists what that storage holds.

staying current

the board does not reload itself. every 30 seconds it fetches the same page in the background and compares the cards to the ones on screen: the lane, the last change time, the tags, the review state and the links, keyed per card, so a re-sort on its own counts as nothing. a check while the tab is in the background is skipped, and a check that fails changes nothing and waits for the next one.

what a check finds:

  • when cards have changed, a 3 changed, reload button appears beside the spec count. a screen reader is told the count once per change rather than every tick.
  • nothing on the page moves until you press that button.
  • after that reload, the cards the count stood for are marked "Updated since you loaded the board". the mark lasts one load; the next reload marks whatever has changed by then.
  • a counted change the reload cannot show says so in the summary row: cards hidden by a filter, cards in the closed Implemented lane (with Show implemented named as the way to see them), and specs that have left the board. the count covers those too, so it says the board is behind rather than promising a visible difference.

the ids of those cards ride through the reload in the tab's session storage, along with any text typed into the filter box, so using the reload button loses neither. both are gone when the tab closes.