How do I know a project made of small features is finished?

Tares tells you a project is finished when you say so. After the last milestone, the orchestrator asks whether the project is finished, and your answer marks it Done. Tares records your words, moves the project to the finished list on the Crew page, and leaves the crew running until you stop it.

How it works

A project you hand to the crew is a set of milestones, each with acceptance checks, and tickets under them. The project page shows four steps across the top: Spec, Build, Review and Done. Below them a progress bar has one segment per ticket, so you see how many are merged at a glance.

Each ticket shows one state: to do, in progress, in review, merged or blocked. A blocked ticket names the tickets it waits for. A builder opens a pull request for each ticket, the reviewer posts a verdict, and the builder merges once the verdict passes and CI is green.

At the end of each milestone, the orchestrator asks you one question with the assumptions the crew made on its own, so you can keep or change them. After the last milestone, it asks whether the project is finished.

• You answer in the orchestrator’s session, in your own words.
• Tares marks the project Done with those words and with every ticket merged.
• The project moves from the open list to the finished list on the Crew page.
• Your answer is stored in the project’s Decisions fold, up to 4,000 characters.

The finished answer is yours to give. The orchestrator does not decide for you that the work is complete. In the worked example in A project, end to end, the person deployed the result first, then answered that it was fully deployed, working and done.

Set it up

1. Open the Crew page in the console, http://127.0.0.1:8787/crew on a local Tares. Find your project under Projects, where open projects are listed with their builders.
2. Open the project page and look at the progress bar and the Tickets fold. Every ticket should read merged. A blocked ticket tells you which tickets it still waits for, and a ticket in review has a pull request you can open.
3. Answer the milestone questions as they arrive in the orchestrator’s session. Each one brings the assumptions the crew made during the milestone. To make an answer stand from now on, say so, for this project or for every project.
4. Check the result yourself against the milestone’s acceptance checks. If the last milestone includes a merge and a deploy, confirm the change is live.
5. When the orchestrator asks whether the project is finished, answer in plain words, for example that it is deployed, working and done. Tares marks the project Done with those words.
6. Reload the Crew page. The project now sits in the finished list, folded below the open projects. Your answer is in the Decisions fold on the project page.
7. Stop the crew separately. With no project left, the orchestrator asks whether to stop it. Run this to stop every station:

tares factory crew down

Run crew up again when you have the next project. Tares keeps the projects, tickets and answers, so the crew carries on from them. If you want to pick up a finished project again, hand it to the crew again, for example with a follow-up spec. New to the factory? Start with Get started.

What you get

• A clear moment of completion. The project is Done because you said so, not because a counter hit a number.
• A record in your words. The answer sits in the Decisions fold next to every other question the crew asked you and your reply.
• A tidy Crew page. Open projects stay at the top, and finished ones fold below, so the page shows what still needs attention.
• Proof of the work. The Tickets fold shows each ticket with the builder that held it, its pull request and its review rounds, and the GitHub fold lists the open and merged pull requests.
• Control over the crew. Marking a project Done does not stop any station. You decide when to run tares factory crew down, and the work is kept when you do.

When something else fits

• If tickets are still blocked, in review or in progress, or a milestone’s acceptance checks do not hold, do not answer that the project is done. Tell the orchestrator what is missing and the crew continues.
• If a stopped crew is all you want and the project is not finished, tares factory crew down stops the stations without marking anything Done.
• If a station shows Waiting for you or Quiet, deal with that first. It stays stopped until you reply, and tares factory crew watch brings back a Quiet one.

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