The completion of task A cannot be achieved until task B is completed.
I can therefore say that task A is in a group of tasks whose completion is suspended 'pending' the completion of task B. I can classify them as 'Pending'
But I want an adjective for the group of tasks that task B belongs to. A group of tasks, the completion of which allows other tasks to be addressed.
Pended? Pendant? - just can't pin down a word that works for this!
Any ideas please!
Prerequisite springs to mind.
It would be immediately intelligible to anyone who has attended an American university or played Dungeons and Dragons.
It can be deployed as either an adjective or a noun.
Its upstream and downstream scopes can be expressed economically (T’s prerequisites are S1 and S2, S1 is prerequisite to T).
Group B tasks are independent (at least with regard to Group A tasks) and Group A tasks are dependent.
You also might characterize Group B tasks as precursor tasks. A common definition of precursor is
a predecessor or forerunner
While that meaning does not describe the contingent relationship, the term also has a meaning in chemistry and biology
a chemical substance that gives rise to another more important substance
The overall sense of the term does convey that the first, independent element must precede and influences the latter, dependent element.
Microsoft, with their inscrutable program "Project", uses the following terms to describe task dependencies:
Predecessor A task whose start or finish date determines the start or finish date of its successor task. Successor A task whose start or finish date is driven by its predecessor task.
The word pending come from latin meaning hanging.
The corresponding word for that which causes something to be pending might be suspending, which, from latin, means causing to hang.
So, though it might be an unusual usage, a suspending task could be one that causes another task to be a pending task.
Another way to describe the preceding (lead the way) task would be to refer to it as the antecedent task, which means goes before. Alternatively, it can be the anteceding task.
In your example, the word 'pending', does not describe the tasks in group A. It is a word which, helps explain their relationship to the tasks in group B.
Other words than 'pending' could have been used, e.g. 'awaiting'.
The verb 'pending' only exists in an active continuous form, in present, past and future continuous tenses. 'The letter is pending/ was pending/has been pending/ will be pending signature'.
I cannot think of how it might be used in any non-continuous sense, (e.g. I have never seen: 'it pended', 'it will pend', 'it has pended' etc.).
Now, 'Job A is pending the completion of Job B' is the same thing as saying 'Job A is awaiting the completion of Job B'. But even using the latter I cannot turn it around so that Job B becomes the subject. But I could use the adjective 'integral' and say 'The completion of Job B is integral to the completion of Job A.'But that is not a present continuous form, I do realise that.
But I am afraid that is the best I can do.
Edit. The problem you have can be expressed simply. 'Whilst Jim is waiting for Bill, what is Bill doing?' I suppose you could say 'he is keeping Jim waiting', but that would suggest he was late.
I use contingent in my apps to describe the exact same thing.
depending on something else that might or might not happen
I would simply have "Contingent on {NAMES}".
You've described a hypothetical proposition:
The completion of task A cannot be achieved until task B is completed.
It means that the completion of A implies that B is done as well. The problem is that it doesn't say anything about how B gets completed (just A).
We're saying that B is ok if A is ok, but we didn't say what it took to complete B. For that reason, the adjective 'pending' has no true logical counterpart.
How about causal or causative?
