Pipelines

A pipeline is the set of stages a work item moves through, plus the rules about moving between them. It is what the columns on the work board are, and what a refused move is refused by.

Where to find it

Screen	Where it lives	What you need
Pipelines — `/admin/pipelines`	Settings → Work & scheduling → Pipelines	Permission to read work items; editing needs the designer permission

The catalogue

Each row shows the pipeline's Name, its Type affinity, how many Stages it has, how many items are In flight on it, how many Gated moves it declares, and its Origin.

Origin is global (shared by every space, read-only here) or this space. A global row you want to change is copied first — Copy to this space — and your copy then shadows the shared one. A global row that has been shadowed says so: global · shadowed.

Stages

A pipeline is a list of stages, each with a Name, a Slug (its identity), an optional WIP limit, and a Done (terminal) flag.

Important

Done is a terminal stage — never a flag. An item is finished because it reached a terminal stage, not because somebody ticked something. That is why "done" filtering on the board and in My Work is reliable: there is exactly one place the answer lives.

A WIP limit caps how many items may sit in that stage at once. Stages with no limit read unlimited.

Allowed moves and gates

This is the part worth reading twice, because the default is permissive and the rule is per destination:

No rows = free movement. A row targeting a stage restricts entry into that stage to the listed moves.

So adding one row does not lock the whole pipeline down — it locks down entry into the one stage that row names. Stages nobody has written a row about stay freely reachable.

Each move row has:

Field	What it means
From	the stage being left — or any stage, which states a rule once for every entry into the destination
To	the stage being entered
Required permission key	who may make this move
Gate	a condition the move must pass
Config	the gate's parameters
Message key	an optional custom wording for the refusal

All gates on a move must hold, and a refusal names the unmet one in plain words — not "move refused", but which condition was not met.

A gate whose evaluator has not shipped yet is shown as such: not evaluable yet — moves into this stage will be refused until its evaluator lands. That is deliberate honesty — a gate that cannot be evaluated refuses rather than silently passing.

The override key

Override permission key names who may bypass the rules. Every bypass is audited. It exists because real work sometimes has to move anyway; recording who did it is what makes that acceptable.

Type affinity

Type affinity ties a pipeline to a work item type, or leaves it at any. A work item type then names its default pipeline — see Work Items.

Enabling and disabling

Enabled controls whether the pipeline can be used. A disabled pipeline keeps its stages and its history; items already on it are not disturbed.

Tip

If a drag on the work board springs back, read the message: it is the pipeline's own refusal and it names the rule. Either the move is not in the allowed list for that destination stage, you lack the permission the move requires, or a gate did not hold.