Coming from Linear or Jira
This guide is for a team moving to By Dawn from Linear or Jira. By the end you’ll know which By Dawn word to use for each thing you know, the few habits that change once agents do the building, and how to bring your work across without stopping it.
Most of By Dawn will feel familiar: a board, tickets, sub-tickets, epics, cycles and labels. What’s new is who does the work in the middle of the board, and that changes a few habits more than it changes the words.
The words
Section titled “The words”| Linear | Jira | By Dawn |
|---|---|---|
| Workspace | Site | Organization |
| Team | Project | Project for the board, with its own columns and repos, and Team for who owns the work |
| Workflow states | Workflow statuses and board columns | Columns: Backlog, Planning, Running, Review and Completed in a new project |
| Issue | Story, task or bug | Ticket. Jira’s issue types become labels, such as type:bug |
| Sub-issue | Sub-task | Sub-ticket, shown as BIL-142.1 |
| Project | Epic | Epic |
| Project milestone | Milestone, a phase of one epic | |
| Cycle | Sprint | Cycle |
| Estimate | Story points | Estimate, on a scale the project picks |
| Blocks, related, duplicate | Issue links | Relations: blocked by, blocks, related to, duplicate of |
Two of these trip people up. A Linear project is a By Dawn epic, because in By Dawn a project is the board itself. A Linear team’s workflow (its columns, cycles and ID prefix) belongs to the By Dawn project, and its people and their tickets to a By Dawn team, so several teams can share one board. A ticket keeps its ID when it moves to another team. And By Dawn nests one level of sub-tickets under a ticket, so a deeper tree, such as a Linear sub-issue of a sub-issue, is flattened when it comes in.
What works differently
Section titled “What works differently”Moving a card starts the work
Section titled “Moving a card starts the work”In Linear or Jira, moving an issue to In Progress records that someone has started. In By Dawn, moving a ticket into the Running column starts an agent on it. So the board is something you act through, not just something you keep up to date, and By Dawn moves the cards itself as the work goes: to Running when an agent starts, and to Review when it has finished or needs you.
A ticket describes an outcome, not a task for a person
Section titled “A ticket describes an outcome, not a task for a person”An issue written for a teammate can lean on what they already know. A ticket for an agent says what should be true when it’s done, how you’ll check it, and what not to touch. Writing tickets an agent can finish shows the difference on a real ticket.
Blocked means blocked
Section titled “Blocked means blocked”A blocks link in Linear or Jira is a note to people. In By Dawn, an agent can’t start a ticket until everything blocking it is completed, and an epic launch starts each ticket as its blockers finish. So add a blocking link only where the order really matters, and don’t leave stale ones behind.
Your time moves to the ends
Section titled “Your time moves to the ends”With agents building, the work that takes your time is at the two ends of each ticket: writing it and agreeing its plan at the start, and reviewing it at the end. Plan your cycles around how much your team can review, not how much it could build. Running a cycle with agents covers it.
Done is proved, not reported
Section titled “Done is proved, not reported”A mission checks each ticket before it’s called finished: tests and build, CI, and whatever else your team ticks, each marked as Verified, AI-reviewed or Reported. A ticket in Review comes with that evidence, so a review starts from facts. Reviewing agent work explains how to read it.
Bring your work over
Section titled “Bring your work over”You don’t have to start from an empty board. A project admin can bring your work in from Linear or Jira, either once or kept in sync for up to 180 days while your team moves over. A sync lets people who still work in the old tracker carry on, and their changes usually reach By Dawn within a minute.
By Dawn proposes the whole mapping from your tracker’s own data: which column each status lands in, the priorities, who each person is, and how epics, sub-tasks and sprints come across. You check it, and a dry run shows what would happen before anything is created. A few things to know before you start:
- Imported tickets get new identifiers, such as
BIL-412. Each card shows where it came from, such as Jira · PROJ-123 ↗, which opens the original. - An import doesn’t start agents or notify anyone, even when it brings in a ticket that sits in the Running column. It’s bookkeeping, so the team decides what to start.
- No one is invited. People are matched to your By Dawn members by email, and anyone left over keeps their name on the ticket, unassigned.
- Only active and future sprints or cycles join a By Dawn cycle, and By Dawn never creates a cycle for them.
The guides for each tracker walk through the connection and the mapping step by step:
- Import and sync: what every import shares, conflicts, pausing and ending a sync.
- Linear: how Linear’s states, projects, sub-issues and cycles map.
- Jira: how Jira’s statuses, epics, sub-tasks and sprints map, and what syncing back through Jira’s workflow means.
A first week that works
Section titled “A first week that works”- Import one project, kept in sync, so the team can still use the old tracker while it learns By Dawn.
- Rewrite three tickets the way Writing tickets an agent can finish describes, and start each in Plan + build, so you see an agent’s plan before it builds.
- Review them together, as a team, using Reviewing agent work. You’ll learn more about how agents read your tickets from three reviews than from any guide.
- Plan your first cycle around what you reviewed comfortably in that week.
When the team has stopped opening the old tracker, end the sync. The tickets stay in By Dawn and stop updating.
Where to go next
Section titled “Where to go next”- Intro to By Dawn: one ticket, start to finish.
- Words we use: every By Dawn word in one place.