Specification Progress
The Progress tab tracks how far your architecture’s specification has come — how complete and review-ready each item is, and what’s left before it can be built. It’s a picture of design maturity, not build or deployment status.
This is specification progress, not build progress. “Ready” here means a spec is approved and ready to hand to the build team — what happens after that lives on the Build tab.
What Progress Covers
The Progress tab tracks a far wider set of items than the Build tab. Where Build schedules only the things that get built — applications, APIs, services, UI components, and so on — Progress follows the completeness of every specification item in the project. That includes business scenarios, acceptance criteria, requirements, design decisions, and more: anything with a specification to mature shows up here.
Two Views
| View | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Readiness | Every spec placed in a readiness pipeline, with the detail behind each stage. The default view. |
| Plan | The same specs arranged as a dependency board — waves of work — plus a breakdown of remaining effort by delivery team. |
The Readiness Pipeline
Every spec sits in exactly one stage of a readiness pipeline. Select a stage to list the specs in it. You never set the stage by hand — ArchRepo works it out from each item’s signals (see How Readiness Stages Are Worked Out).
| Colour | Stage |
|---|---|
| Grey | Not started |
| Blue | In progress |
| Red | Blocked |
| Amber | Nearly ready |
| Yellow | In review |
| Mint | Approved |
For each spec the table shows its readiness score, whether it has a baseline, its owning team, its open tasks, and Tasks with — the people or teams it needs next, or is waiting on.
Coverage at a Glance
The banner above the pipeline reports, for the specs currently in view, how many have a readiness score, how many are assigned to a team, and how many are not in a milestone or release. Each figure opens the list behind the gap, so you can go straight to fixing it. It’s amber when there are gaps and green when everything is covered.
Grouping and Filters
- Group by — None (every spec once, as a flat list), Milestone, or Release. With no grouping, a spec that appears under several milestones shows its most-advanced stage.
- Filter to a single Milestone or Release, or to one or more Teams.
- Show past milestones reveals milestones whose date has already passed.
- Search finds a spec by reference or name.
Who to Chase
Turn on Who to chase to swap the stage pipeline for a facilitation view: every spec awaiting sign-off, grouped by the approver whose review is still outstanding, each with a direct link to open its approvals. It’s built for driving a review meeting — “Andrew, you have four waiting” — and respects the same milestone, release, and team filters.
To see only the sign-offs waiting on you, use the Awaiting My Approval tab on My Tasks instead.
The Plan View
Switch to Plan to see the specs as a dependency board — grouped into waves, each card showing the spec’s readiness status and its remaining effort, with the same Focus impact and relationship tools as the Build tab. Above the board, Effort by team totals the remaining specification effort for each delivery team, so you can see where the work sits.
The Plan board is the design-side counterpart of the Build tab. The way it works out which spec waits on which is the same model described in How Build Dependencies Are Worked Out.
Where the Durations Come From
The remaining effort on each Plan card, and the totals in Effort by team, come from the estimated durations of the tasks attached to each specification — the work still to do to complete it. This is different from the Build tab, which uses the item’s own Estimate. To change a spec’s remaining effort, add or update its tasks and their estimates.
Using It
- Run a weekly readiness review straight from the pipeline — start at In review and Nearly ready.
- Use Who to chase to clear outstanding sign-offs.
- Watch Blocked for specs stuck behind an upstream dependency.
- Keep the Coverage banner green — every spec scored, attributed to a team, and planned into a milestone or release.
- Use Plan and Effort by team to balance workload across teams.