Tasks
Table of Contents
Summary
In agile practice, a task is the unit of execution: one concrete, finishable piece of work carved out of a story, small enough that its progress is binary — not started, in hand, or done — rather than a percentage. Tasks are how a team turns an outcome into a sequence of changes someone can actually pick up.
In ORE Studio, a task is one pull request's worth of work inside
a story. The hard rule — one task = one PR — gives every
change a reviewable shape, a traceable record (the task's * PRs and
* Review tables), and an honest state in the lifecycle machine.
Tasks are deliberately small; anything bigger splits, or grows up
into a story.
Detail
What a task is
A task names a concrete, completable change: the code, docs, or
tooling delta plus the agile bookkeeping that travels with it. Its
content contract — blurb, * Goal, * Status, * Acceptance,
* Plan, * Notes, * PRs, * Review, * Result — is defined in
Document types. Tasks are created during sprint planning when a
story is decomposed (compass add task --parent-dir <story-dir>), or
later via compass task new when a started story needs another.
During sprint execution a task runs the lifecycle
BACKLOG → STARTED → (maybe BLOCKED → STARTED) → DONE, carried by
compass task start and closed when its PR merges.
Sizing
Hard rule: one task = one PR. Soft limits per task:
- ≤ ~10 files changed.
- ≤ ~400 LOC delta.
- One coherent concept — a reviewer can hold the change in their head.
Tasks exceeding any of these split into multiple tasks, or — if the work is genuinely one outcome and just large — promote to a story whose tasks are the natural decomposition.
Discovered tasks
Work surfaced mid-sprint lands as a discovered task in DISCOVERED
state: at the sprint's inbox/ if it fits no existing story, or
under the current story if it does. A discovered task must leave
DISCOVERED within one orchestrator session — triaged into
BACKLOG, converted to a backlog capture, or dropped (see
lifecycle).
Ready and done
A task is ready to leave BACKLOG when its Goal and Acceptance are
filled and its parent story exists.
A task is done when its PR is merged, * Result is filled, and the
Status row's "Last touched" matches the close date.
See also
- Definition of done — why
* Acceptanceexists and what gatesDONE. - Task in the glossary — the one-line definition.
- Stories — the unit tasks decompose from.
- Sprint execution — the phase tasks run in, including the heartbeat rule.
- Work a task through to merged PR — the runbook for a task's full lifecycle.
- Agile process — the loop these concepts live in.