statuslevels

Statuslevels, also written as status levels, refer to ordered categories used to classify the state, condition, or permission associated with an entity within a system. They provide a simple, scalable way to express qualitative differences without numeric data. Status levels are typically ordinal, meaning that one level is considered higher or more advanced than another, though some implementations use non-ordinal labeling for clarity.

Common domains include software systems, workflows, and governance models. In software, status levels might describe process lifecycle stages (starting, running, paused, stopped), or log severity (trace, debug, info, warning, error, fatal). In access control, roles such as guest, user, moderator, and admin define the level of authority. In project management, states like backlog, ready, in progress, review, and done help track completion. In customer support, statuses such as new, open, in progress, resolved, and closed indicate ticket state.

Design considerations include ensuring consistent naming, a well-defined and documented order, and stability to avoid breaking changes. Levels should be intuitive, localized for multilingual environments, and extensible to accommodate new states. Security considerations include avoiding exposure of sensitive internal stages through user-facing status levels.

Variants include flat versus hierarchical schemes, static levels defined at design time versus dynamic levels assigned by rules, and domain-specific taxonomies that map to broader concepts such as priority, severity, or access control.