Master Linear's engineering workflow vocabulary — cycles, triage, API automation, Git linking, and SLA policies.
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During standup, the team lead asks about Linear cycles. How do they work?
Cycles are Linear's sprint mechanism. You set a duration (e.g. 2 weeks) and add issues to the active cycle. At the end, Linear's automations can carry over incomplete issues to the next cycle automatically. Unlike GitHub Milestones, cycles are rolling and give continuous sprint velocity metrics.
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In a PR review, a teammate adds a triage workflow to the team's Linear setup. What does triage do?
Triage is a dedicated inbox for unprocessed issues. New issues created without a team assignment land in triage. A designated team member (or rotation) reviews them, sets priority, assigns to the right team, and moves them into the workflow — preventing issues from being missed or cluttering active development views.
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An incident occurs and you need to automatically create a Linear issue via the Linear API. How is this done?
Linear's GraphQL API supports full CRUD. The issueCreate mutation accepts teamId, title, description (Markdown), priority, stateId, and labelIds. Generate an API key in Linear settings or use OAuth for integrations. PagerDuty, Datadog, and other alerting tools use this to auto-create incident issues.
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In a design review, the team sets up Linear's Git integration. How does it link PRs to issues?
Linear's Git integration works by detecting issue identifiers (e.g. eng-123) in branch names like feature/eng-123-add-auth or commit messages. When a PR is opened, Linear moves the issue to "In Review"; when merged, it moves to "Done" (configurable). It works with GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket.
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During a code review, the team enables Linear SLA tracking. What does it provide?
Linear SLA policies are configured per team with time targets by priority (P0: 4h resolve, P1: 24h, etc.). Linear tracks time-to-first-response and time-to-resolution, visually highlighting breached (red) and at-risk (yellow) issues in list views. Notifications alert on-call team members before SLAs breach.