glossary — plain english
Finish-to-start
The most common dependency type: task B can't start until task A finishes. If you'd say 'then' out loud, you mean finish-to-start.
Design, then build. Bake, then frost. Finish-to-start is the default relationship between two tasks, so much so that most people draw it without knowing it has a name: the arrow from the end of one bar to the beginning of the next.
The textbooks list three siblings. Start-to-start: B can begin once A begins — "content writing can start as soon as build starts." Finish-to-finish: B can't wrap until A does — "documentation finishes when the feature does." Start-to-finish exists mostly to complete the grid; in twenty years of drawing charts you might use it once, for a shift handover.
In practice, nearly every real plan is finish-to-start links plus a few deliberate overlaps — and overlaps are usually better modeled as lead time on a finish-to-start link than as one of the exotic types. If your tool only supports finish-to-start, you're not missing much.
See it on a real chart
Describe your project in plain English and ganttchart.ai turns it into a shareable Gantt chart in seconds — every term on this page included. Or read the method first: the plain-English planning guide.