Work a side quest

Some work is not part of any spec. You notice a bug while doing something else, or a small cleanup that is worth doing but does not belong to a feature. That is a side quest, and Trove treats it as a first-class piece of work rather than a lesser one.

File it when you spot it

While I was in the audio code I noticed the ring buffer overflows silently. Make a side quest for it.

Trove creates a work unit with no parent section. It is the same kind of object a planned unit is — one model, one status enum, one API — and what distinguishes the two is membership, not kind.

It records what you were doing when you spotted it, so the association survives even though the unit belongs to no spec.

Organise them with tags

Side quests are grouped by tags, not by a container:

Tag it audio and reliability.

There is deliberately no bucket spec to file them under. A container implies the things inside it run together, and side quests do not — inventing one would make the model lie about how the work behaves.

Find them again

What side quests are tagged audio?

Tags are how you narrow, since a side quest has no path to look it up by. A tag does not match a prefix: asking for audio will not sweep up audiotest.

Run one directly

A side quest does not need a plan:

Run that ring-buffer side quest in lane 2.

Dispatch takes a work unit key just as happily as a plan key. The lane claims it, gets its briefing, and works it exactly as it would a planned unit.

Or pick it into a plan

If it should ride along with a feature, name it in the plan:

Add the ring-buffer side quest to the audio plan.

A plan is whole specs plus individually chosen side quests. That is the one place where cherry-picking is allowed, and it is why side quests never need a fake spec to live in.

It still needs a Definition of Done

The same rule applies: say how you would know it is finished. Small work is not exempt — a two-line fix whose done-ness nobody can check is exactly the kind of thing that gets argued about three weeks later.

What about a planned unit that lost its home?

If you re-parent a unit out of its section without giving it a new one, it becomes left-behind: still planned by origin, but with no section. Trove keeps that distinct from a side quest on purpose — a side quest was born opportunistically, a left-behind unit was orphaned, and the two want different responses. One is fine as it is; the other wants re-homing or retiring.