Work Management Glossary · Workplace & Collaboration

Automation flow: a customer-built rule of trigger, conditions, branches and actions that changes work items after an event, metered by plan (Automation Rules).
Burndown chart: remaining sprint work plotted against time in the board's estimation statistic, with scope added mid-sprint shown as scope change (Boards, Sprints & Cycles).
Change advisory board (CAB): the recurring group that reviews and authorizes normal change requests before they are implemented (IT & Service Management).
Closing keyword: a word such as "fixes" or "closes" before an issue reference in a pull request or commit that closes the issue when the change merges to the default branch (Development Collaboration).
CMDB: the configuration management database of configuration items and their relationships, used for impact analysis on incidents and changes (IT & Service Management).
CODEOWNERS: a repository file mapping paths to the people or teams whose review is required for changes to them, where the last matching pattern wins (Development Collaboration).
Company-managed space: a Jira space configured by Jira admins through shared schemes, so one workflow or field change applies to every space using it (Workflows & Status Machines).
Cumulative flow diagram: an area chart of items in each status over time, where a widening band marks a bottleneck (Boards, Sprints & Cycles).
Custom field: a customer-defined attribute on work items, with contexts, options and per-tenant limits, and costs in validation, indexing and export (Work Items, Hierarchies & Fields).
Cycle (Linear): an automatic, repeating time-box of one to eight weeks whose unfinished issues roll over by default (Boards, Sprints & Cycles).
Cycle time: the elapsed time between when a work item started and when it finished (Boards, Sprints & Cycles).
Delivery plan: an Azure Boards timeline of up to 20 team backlogs with cross-team dependencies drawn between items (Portfolios, Roadmaps & Goals).
Deployment gating: a pipeline pausing until the linked change request is approved in the service desk (IT & Service Management).
Development panel: the section of a work item showing linked branches, commits, pull requests, builds and deployments, inferred from the item key in their text (Development Collaboration).
Flow actor: the identity an automation rule acts as, such as "Automation for Jira" by default in Jira (Automation Rules).
Goal: an outcome that several projects contribute to, with sub-goals, key results and an on track, at risk or off track status (Portfolios, Roadmaps & Goals).
Impact and urgency matrix: the lookup that computes an incident's priority from how much it affects and how soon it hurts (IT & Service Management).
Initiative (Linear): a grouping of projects around a company objective, with sub-initiatives and status updates (Portfolios, Roadmaps & Goals).
InnerSource: applying open source development practices inside a company, so any team can read and propose changes to another team's code (Development Collaboration).
JQL: Jira Query Language, a field-operator-value language with keywords and functions that returns work items and is not SQL (Queries, Views & Dashboards).
Loop detection: an automation engine's limit on how many times rules may trigger themselves or each other in succession before the chain is stopped (Automation Rules).
Major incident: an incident causing significant business disruption, run through its own process, queue and manager (IT & Service Management).
Merge queue: a mechanism that merges approved pull requests in order, testing each on top of those ahead of it (Development Collaboration).
Permission-trimmed query: a query whose results, counts and rollups include only what the viewer may see (Queries, Views & Dashboards).
Plan (Jira Plans): a sandboxed view over boards, spaces and filters for scheduling, capacity and dependencies across teams, formerly Advanced Roadmaps (Portfolios, Roadmaps & Goals).
Post function: a step that runs after a workflow transition, such as setting a field or firing an event (Workflows & Status Machines).
Request type: a service desk form with its own fields, workflow and audience that employees use to ask for something (IT & Service Management).
Resolution: the field recording how a work item ended (done, won't do, duplicate), kept separate from its status (Workflows & Status Machines).
Saved filter: a stored query with an owner and an audience, shared without widening anyone's access to the items it returns (Queries, Views & Dashboards).
SLA clock: a per-ticket timer that starts, pauses and stops on conditions, runs on a business calendar, and records whether its goal was met (IT & Service Management).
Smart Commit: a command in a commit message (comment, log time or transition) that acts on the Jira work item whose key it names (Development Collaboration).
Sprint: a fixed time-box of one month or less with a goal, whose scope and estimates are recorded at start and close (Boards, Sprints & Cycles).
State category: a fixed product-level class (such as proposed, in progress, resolved, completed) that every customer-named status maps to (Workflows & Status Machines).
Status update: an owner's dated note on a project or goal with a health value, collected on a cadence (Portfolios, Roadmaps & Goals).
Team-managed space: a Jira space set up and maintained by its own team, with a self-contained workflow (Workflows & Status Machines).
Transition: a permitted move between two statuses, with conditions, validators and post functions attached (Workflows & Status Machines).
Triage: a team inbox where work arriving from outside the team is accepted, declined, merged as a duplicate or snoozed (Boards, Sprints & Cycles).
Velocity: the sum of estimates a team completes per sprint, useful for its own capacity and misleading as a performance measure (Boards, Sprints & Cycles).
WIP limit: an advisory maximum (and sometimes minimum) on items in a board column (Boards, Sprints & Cycles).
WIQL: Azure Boards' Work Item Query Language, with SELECT, FROM, WHERE, ORDER BY and an ASOF clause for historical queries (Queries, Views & Dashboards).

Automation flow: a customer-built rule of trigger, conditions, branches and actions that changes work items after an event, metered by plan (Automation Rules).
Burndown chart: remaining sprint work plotted against time in the board's estimation statistic, with scope added mid-sprint shown as scope change (Boards, Sprints & Cycles).
Change advisory board (CAB): the recurring group that reviews and authorizes normal change requests before they are implemented (IT & Service Management).
Closing keyword: a word such as "fixes" or "closes" before an issue reference in a pull request or commit that closes the issue when the change merges to the default branch (Development Collaboration).
CMDB: the configuration management database of configuration items and their relationships, used for impact analysis on incidents and changes (IT & Service Management).
CODEOWNERS: a repository file mapping paths to the people or teams whose review is required for changes to them, where the last matching pattern wins (Development Collaboration).
Company-managed space: a Jira space configured by Jira admins through shared schemes, so one workflow or field change applies to every space using it (Workflows & Status Machines).
Cumulative flow diagram: an area chart of items in each status over time, where a widening band marks a bottleneck (Boards, Sprints & Cycles).
Custom field: a customer-defined attribute on work items, with contexts, options and per-tenant limits, and costs in validation, indexing and export (Work Items, Hierarchies & Fields).
Cycle (Linear): an automatic, repeating time-box of one to eight weeks whose unfinished issues roll over by default (Boards, Sprints & Cycles).
Cycle time: the elapsed time between when a work item started and when it finished (Boards, Sprints & Cycles).
Delivery plan: an Azure Boards timeline of up to 20 team backlogs with cross-team dependencies drawn between items (Portfolios, Roadmaps & Goals).
Deployment gating: a pipeline pausing until the linked change request is approved in the service desk (IT & Service Management).
Development panel: the section of a work item showing linked branches, commits, pull requests, builds and deployments, inferred from the item key in their text (Development Collaboration).
Flow actor: the identity an automation rule acts as, such as "Automation for Jira" by default in Jira (Automation Rules).
Goal: an outcome that several projects contribute to, with sub-goals, key results and an on track, at risk or off track status (Portfolios, Roadmaps & Goals).
Impact and urgency matrix: the lookup that computes an incident's priority from how much it affects and how soon it hurts (IT & Service Management).
Initiative (Linear): a grouping of projects around a company objective, with sub-initiatives and status updates (Portfolios, Roadmaps & Goals).
InnerSource: applying open source development practices inside a company, so any team can read and propose changes to another team's code (Development Collaboration).
JQL: Jira Query Language, a field-operator-value language with keywords and functions that returns work items and is not SQL (Queries, Views & Dashboards).
Loop detection: an automation engine's limit on how many times rules may trigger themselves or each other in succession before the chain is stopped (Automation Rules).
Major incident: an incident causing significant business disruption, run through its own process, queue and manager (IT & Service Management).
Merge queue: a mechanism that merges approved pull requests in order, testing each on top of those ahead of it (Development Collaboration).
Permission-trimmed query: a query whose results, counts and rollups include only what the viewer may see (Queries, Views & Dashboards).
Plan (Jira Plans): a sandboxed view over boards, spaces and filters for scheduling, capacity and dependencies across teams, formerly Advanced Roadmaps (Portfolios, Roadmaps & Goals).
Post function: a step that runs after a workflow transition, such as setting a field or firing an event (Workflows & Status Machines).
Request type: a service desk form with its own fields, workflow and audience that employees use to ask for something (IT & Service Management).
Resolution: the field recording how a work item ended (done, won't do, duplicate), kept separate from its status (Workflows & Status Machines).
Saved filter: a stored query with an owner and an audience, shared without widening anyone's access to the items it returns (Queries, Views & Dashboards).
SLA clock: a per-ticket timer that starts, pauses and stops on conditions, runs on a business calendar, and records whether its goal was met (IT & Service Management).
Smart Commit: a command in a commit message (comment, log time or transition) that acts on the Jira work item whose key it names (Development Collaboration).
Sprint: a fixed time-box of one month or less with a goal, whose scope and estimates are recorded at start and close (Boards, Sprints & Cycles).
State category: a fixed product-level class (such as proposed, in progress, resolved, completed) that every customer-named status maps to (Workflows & Status Machines).
Status update: an owner's dated note on a project or goal with a health value, collected on a cadence (Portfolios, Roadmaps & Goals).
Team-managed space: a Jira space set up and maintained by its own team, with a self-contained workflow (Workflows & Status Machines).
Transition: a permitted move between two statuses, with conditions, validators and post functions attached (Workflows & Status Machines).
Triage: a team inbox where work arriving from outside the team is accepted, declined, merged as a duplicate or snoozed (Boards, Sprints & Cycles).
Velocity: the sum of estimates a team completes per sprint, useful for its own capacity and misleading as a performance measure (Boards, Sprints & Cycles).
WIP limit: an advisory maximum (and sometimes minimum) on items in a board column (Boards, Sprints & Cycles).
WIQL: Azure Boards' Work Item Query Language, with SELECT, FROM, WHERE, ORDER BY and an ASOF clause for historical queries (Queries, Views & Dashboards).