Backlog

Backlog

The backlog is the work-intake home — latent work intent captured as issue, improvement, chore, risk, or idea items, triaged and promoted into slices.

needs = hard dependency. after = soft ordering (suggestion).

The CLI is the source of truth for exact flags: doctrine backlog --help

Creating new backlog items:

• Determine kind membership / validity
• Survey backlog for potential duplicates / neighbors
• Prefer expanding / improving an appropriate existing item
• Choose a clear, concise title
• Create the new backlog item
• Read & fill its template
• Tag it appropriately and consistently
• Record any dependencies and appropriate sequencing priorities

Verbs

Kind membership

• issue — a bug or defect
• improvement — a tooling/UX gap or enhancement (no new feature)
• chore — housekeeping, tech-debt, refactor
• risk — unresolved work-risk (uncertain future harm needing mitigation, acceptance, or expiry); NOT a general epistemic note
• idea — a speculative proposal, not yet scoped or committed

The work-intake membership test ([[mem.concept.backlog.work-intake-membership]]): a candidate that does not fit the work-status lifecycle (open|triaged|started|resolved|closed) is not a backlog item.

Status lifecycle

open → triaged → started → resolved → closed

• Terminal statuses (resolved, closed) require a resolution, passed via --resolution (fixed|done|mitigated|accepted|expired|duplicate|wont-do|obsolete|promoted).
• Non-terminal statuses forbid a resolution (re-opening auto-clears it).
• doctrine backlog edit <ID> --status <STATUS> transitions in-place. --status is required; nothing is prompted. Terminal statuses also need --resolution.

Tags

Lowercased, [a-z0-9_:-]. Colon namespacing (e.g. area:backlog). Adds are positional, removes use --remove/-d — both in one call: doctrine backlog tag <ID> area:cli --remove stale.

Dependencies

• needs — hard prerequisite; validates every ref exists, refuses a closing dependency cycle (names the members; nothing written). Use for "X blocks Y."
• after — soft sequencing preference; validates target exists, never rejects a cycle (evicted at order time). Use for "do X before Y if convenient."

Rules

• The id prefix (ISS-, IMP-, CHR-, RSK-, IDE-) auto-selects the kind — no need to pass --kind to show/edit/tag/needs/after.
• A risk admitted to the backlog must be unresolved work-risk, not a general note.
• Don't hand-edit backlog TOML — use the verb. Prose (*.md) is hand-edited.
• A terminal item is hidden from list by default; use --all or --status closed to reveal.