What is ShipLean
ShipLean is a self-hosted planning app for one team. A project contains its members, work items, boards, and sprints. You can plan work in backlogs and boards, track a sprint on its taskboard, and let an agent work through the MCP endpoint.
What you can do
Section titled “What you can do”- Plan in backlogs. Rank Stories, Features, and Epics. Switch between a list and a tree, filter items, and see points and progress roll up from child Stories and Bugs.
- Track work on boards. Map each work item type’s states to columns. Set work-in-progress limits, swimlanes, card fields, styles, and a definition of done.
- Plan sprints. Set capacity per person, use the forecast to fill upcoming sprints, then follow the sprint backlog, burndown, and velocity chart.
- Move sprint work on the taskboard. See the sprint’s Stories and Bugs with their Task states, grouped by Story or by person.
- Keep work together. Work items have fields, Tasks, a Markdown discussion, links, attachments, and revision history.
- Configure a project. Set its permanent key of two to four letters, its working days, its members, the states for each work item type, and the velocity window that the forecast uses.
- Import a Jira project. Map it into one ShipLean project, review progress and errors, and rerun the import when needed.
- Manage the instance. Admins manage users, one-time passwords, lockouts, project creation, and instance-admin access.
- Connect agents over MCP. Approve an agent in the browser. The agent can then read and write work items under its own name.
How work items fit together
Section titled “How work items fit together”Epics hold Features. A Feature can hold smaller Features, Stories, and Bugs. Stories and Bugs hold Tasks. The hierarchy keeps a broad area, its planned outcomes, and the work that delivers them in one place.
Every type has its own states. Each state belongs to one category: Proposed, In Progress, Resolved, Completed, or Removed. You choose the states for each type in project settings, and boards map columns to those states. The app uses categories for shared behavior, such as detecting completed work.
Estimates use story points. ShipLean does not hard-delete work. To remove an item, move it to a Removed state or archive it. Sprints are flat time boxes. Each sprint records capacity per person.
For the full model and its design decisions, see the public issue #1.