Core concepts
How projects, releases, areas, and tasks fit together. A flat model with no epics, swimlanes, or nested hierarchies.
The data model is intentionally flat. Four concepts cover the entire surface, no epics, no swimlanes, no nested hierarchies to maintain.
Projects
A project is a workspace, usually one per product or codebase. Each has its own releases, areas, tasks, members, activity feed, and Feedback Hub. You can belong to many projects; switching between them is one click in the sidebar.
Projects have a status (active or archived) and a visibility setting. Free tier gets one project; paid tiers raise or remove the cap. See Plans and limits.
Releases
A release is what you're shipping next. It has a name (v1.4.0, MVP, Beta, or a date), a status (upcoming, active, or completed), and an optional target date.
Frostbyte enforces a single active release per project. Setting one release as active automatically demotes the previous active release to "upcoming". This is the most opinionated choice in the model, it forces clarity about what "now" means.
New tasks default to the current active release. See Releases for the full lifecycle.
Areas
An area is a piece of your system you maintain over time, Auth, Billing, API, Frontend, Mobile. Unlike releases, areas don't have a lifecycle: they exist as long as the system they describe exists.
Each task is tagged to one area. This lets you filter the board by what part of the codebase a task touches, independent of which release it ships in. See Areas.
Tasks
A task is one unit of work, a feature, a bug, or an improvement. Each task has:
- Type: feature, bug, or improvement.
- Priority: low, medium, high, urgent.
- Status: to-do, in-progress, done.
- Area: which part of the system it touches.
- Release: which release it ships in.
- Assignee (optional): who owns it.
Tasks support inline editing, drag-and-drop between status columns, deep-linking by URL, and subtasks (a checklist inside the task modal). See Tasks.
How they relate
A typical week: pick or create the active release, write the tasks you want to ship in it, tag each task to the right area, start working. The Activity feed records every change so the team can catch up after a day off without reading every Slack thread.
When in doubt, keep releases short and tasks small. If a release feels bloated, split it. If a task feels too big, break it into subtasks or two separate tasks.