Stages of a User story in the Rally and its meaning

Rally is the agile management  software which deals from User stories writing to the Iterations, Sprints, releases and defect management module too.  During agile process Rally helps in giving the picture of the real time status of the project. The basic functionality in the Rally tool for a particular Agile project is as following:

• Name of the Project is defined
• Project is divided into Iterations and sprints
• Each sprints and Iterations are time bound
• Each sprints has the User Stories Defined
• Each User story Contains the acceptance criteria, description of the requirement and exit criteria for that requirement
• Each User stories has its defined tasks defined by the developers and testers
• User stories have child user story if needed
• Each User Stories have certain points/score defined
• Each User Stories goes from the stage of Backlog to Completed

Thus Rally is the tool which keeps track of the Business Requirement, project time estimation, Status of the progress in the development work, defect management and reporting for an Agile Project.

As listed above, in the Rally tool user stories are listed with the business requirements and they start from the stage of the Backlog to the Completed stage.  Today I’m going to describe the stages of the User Stories in Rally and their meaning:

1. Backlog stage

This is the first stage of the Rally User Story and is denoted by the word “B” in the software. During this stage, there is no any development task or the development team effort is needed.  Here the Business Analyst starts up gathering the business requirement for the particular user story. During this stage it is the duty of the BA to make sure that User story is well written with acceptance and exit criteria defined. They should make sure that adequate supporting documents has been attached with the user story.

2. Defined Stage

This is the next stage of the Rally User story and still there is no any development task is needed. This stage is denoted by the word “D” in the software. The change of the state of the User story from “B” to “D” happens on the sprint planning meeting day during which all of the team meets at a team room and review the user story. The Story writer (Business Analyst) elaborates the user story among the team. The developers and testers ask to the story writer if they have any particular questions regarding the User story.  Here the story has been well defined to the development team(Developers+Testers) and they can now write their tasks and provide the estimates for the User story. When the stage of all the child user stories are set to defined from backlog  then the state of the parent user story automatically gets updated to the Defined state.

3. In- Progress

This is the stage in which real development work has started for that user story and the user story has been assigned to one of the particular sprints. In short, the development team has understood the requirement of the user story and picked up it to work on it.  It is denoted by the word “P” in the Rally. If the user story has multiple child stories then when the state of all the child stories has been changed to “P” then state of the parent user story is automatically changed to “P” regardless of its original state,

4. Completed

This stage has been denoted as “C” in the Rally. This state describe that all the development tasks including the coding and task listed has been completed. This is the stage when the Testing Team picks up the user story and starts its testing and executing their related test cases. When the state of all the child stories is changed to “C” then the state of the parent User story is automatically updated to “C” regardless of its original status.

5. Accepted

This stage has been marked as “A” in the Rally. The user story is accepted when its defined business acceptance criteria are completely  met and there are no any related defects to the user story.  When the state of all the child stories is changed to “A” then the state of the parent User story is automatically updated to “C” regardless of its original status.