Introduction
The five phases of a project in Zuse Bifrost, the one record they share, and the roles that work in it.
Zuse Bifrost is an application lifecycle management system built for one way of working: a project is described once, in full, and every later activity reads that description instead of restating it.
A word on the voice
Zuse Bifrost speaks with a light Norse accent, for fun. Components are forged in the workshops, environments are charted, webhook deliveries fly like ravens, the activity log is the runes, Heimdall keeps watch at the bridge and a refusal comes from the Norns; an empty page says "Nothing forged in the workshops yet". The things themselves keep their plain names, a project is a project and a team a team, and the labels, buttons, statuses and fields this guide names are exactly what you press; the flourish lives only in the sentences around them.
The one record
A project holds its client, its components (the web app, the API, the mobile app), the environments each component runs in, the stakeholders and the personas, and then everything the Business Analyst writes down about what is to be built: epics and user stories with structured acceptance criteria, functional and non-functional requirements, business rules, use cases, a glossary, a data dictionary, risks, assumptions, issues, dependencies, decisions and design references. Those artefacts are linked to each other, reviewed, approved, versioned and frozen into baselines; a change after a baseline is a change request with its impact spelled out.
The five phases
- Plan. The Business Analyst captures the project through a guided intake, or imports a brief and reviews what the AI drafted from it. Requirements are approved by the project's leads and, where the stakeholders ask for it, signed off by the client.
- Build. Developers plan sprints from the approved backlog, work a board whose columns are the story statuses, link branches and pull requests by the story key, and log time against what they did.
- Test. QA derives test cases from the acceptance criteria, composes plans and runs them per environment, raises defects from failed steps, imports automation results, and reads coverage in the traceability matrix. UAT runs are signed off by the client.
- Release. Release managers compose a release from done work, read its readiness score, collect the go-live approvals, promote deployments through the registered environments and publish the notes.
- Maintain. Incidents run in an incident room with SLA timers and a public status line; support tickets are triaged, answered and converted into bugs, stories or change requests; post-mortems become action items on the backlog.
Who works in it
| Role | What they do |
|---|---|
| Business Analyst | Captures and maintains the project record; submits artefacts for review. |
| Project Manager | Approves, baselines, runs sprints and releases, watches health. |
| Developer | Works the board, links code, logs time, moves stories with a note. |
| QA Engineer | Writes and runs tests, raises defects, signs off UAT with the client. |
| Release Manager | Composes releases, promotes deployments, publishes notes. |
| Admin | Runs the workspace: members, roles, tokens, webhooks, integrations, AI budgets. |
| Client guest | Reads the approved record for their project, approves what is assigned to them, raises tickets, follows releases and incidents. |
AI on every surface
The Heimdall panel answers questions from the live record and runs the same tools an agent would; every editor offers inline drafting, rewriting and checking; a brief can be imported into a reviewable scaffold; stories are scored for quality; test cases, release notes, impact analyses, incident timelines and ticket replies are drafted for a person to accept. Nothing is written without that acceptance, every accepted draft is stamped in the activity log, and every call is metered against the team's monthly budget.
Where you land
Signing in opens the Dashboard, the overview of your work across every project you can see. Today it greets you by name and says what will fill it: your projects, the approvals waiting on you, sprints and incidents appear there as the modules that raise them land. The sidebar beside it holds the project selector, Projects and Clients (the registry), Ask Heimdall, the notifications bell, the team switcher and your account menu, and every settings page described in Your Account and Your Workspace is one click from there. Choosing a project in the selector opens its overview and swaps the menu for the project's own; Back to Dashboard brings you here again.
How is this guide?
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