There are two fields in ZenTao to track the changes of stories. One is Story Status and the other one is the Development Stage of Stories. Now, let’s take a look at the two fields in details.

1. Story Status

There are four types of story status, Draft, Active, Changed and Closed. The corresponding actions are Create, Change, and Review, Close and Activate. The status flow is shown below.

2. Development stage of stories

A stage is to describe the phase of an active story in development. The stages include Wait, Planned, Projected, Developing, Developed, Testing, Tested, Accepted and Released.

How to change the development stages of stories?

One way is to change the development stage through editing. However, we prefer another option, which is to carefully set the type of task, such as development, testing, when creating tasks. And ZenTao will automatically calculate the development status of a story based on the changes of different types of tasks. The rules are,

1. If stories are not linked to any projects or plans, the phase will be Wait.
2. If stories are linked to plans but not to projects, it will be Planned.
3. If stories are linked to projects but not decomposed to tasks, it will be Projected.
4. If stories are linked to projects and decomposed:

• If one of the development tasks is being done while all the test requests have not yet begun, it will be Developing.
• If all the development tasks are completed while all the test requests have not yet been begun, it will be Developed.
• If one of the test requests has been begun, it will be Testing.
• If all the test requests are completed while some development tasks have not been completed, it will also be Testing.
• If both the test requests and development tasks are completed, it will be Tested.

 6. If the stories are linked in Product > Release, it will be Released.

Description of the stage of stories which belong to a multi-branch or multi-platform type product:

Take a multi-platform product as an example. A product has Andriod and IOS platforms.

• If the story is not linked to any project/plan, the story status is Wait.
• If the story is linked to all platforms and its linked plans are linked to all platforms, the story status is "All Platforms: Planned". If the plan is linked to IOS, the story status is "IOS: Planned". If the story is linked to a specific platform, its status will be decided in the way mentioned above ( How does a story change in development? ).
• The project is linked to a platform of the product. For example, the project is linked to IOS, and it is linked to the stories of all the platforms of the product it is linked to and the stories linked to IOS. The stories haven't been decomposed into tasks. Then, the status of a story that is linked to IOS is "Planned" and the story status of all the platforms that the product is linked to is "IOS: Planned". If the story status of all the platform that this story is linked to is "Planned", it will show "All Platforms: Planned" and "IOS: Projected".

If a story is linked to two projects, one of which is linked to IOS and the other to all platforms of the product. Task breakdown is done yet. Then the status of this story is "All Platforms: Projected" and "IOS: Projected".

Notes: From Zendo 7.2.stable version, you can manually change the stage of the requirement. (If the requirement belongs to all branches/all platforms, the system will calculate the stage under all branches/platforms, so it cannot be edited or modified separately.)

Tips:

Phase=Stage (Stage is a field in the database and Phase is a field in the ZenTao page.)