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What are the Board States and how they are different?
What are the Board States and how they are different?

Description of the board states and functionalities they offer

Kendis Team avatar
Written by Kendis Team
Updated over a week ago

Kendis board states help to provide a complete journey with the ability to view what was planned, how did it change and what kind of scope changes it had.

Kendis has 4 board states.

  • Draft

  • Planning

  • Tracking

  • Close

These states are fixed and it's not possible to edit their behavior or other options.

Important

It is not possible to revert the state of the board, once the board is closed, you can't open it or change the state back to the tracking. State change action must be done carefully at the right time.

How it works

Each board state is a fully functional board, when you change a state and move to the next state Kendis takes certain actions, for example, if you move your board from "Draft" to "Planning" the following will happen

  • Kendis will create a copy of the "Draft" state of the board and make that available to the users as the "Planning" state of the board

  • The draft state will be locked and by default, it's not possible to make any changes in the previous state. All the data including dependencies, risks, and objectives will be saved as-is.

  • Users with the admin rights can "unlock" the previous state board and make changes, however, no changes through "webhook" are applied to the previous board state.

  • Current state, e.g., in this case, "Planning" will become the active state, and users can perform all the actions they want.

  • Each board state has it's own unique URL

Special case

Tracking state has some special behavior in the "Smart Reports", more details are explained in the following sections.

1. Draft

When a board is created it will be in the "Draft" state. The main purpose of this state is to prepare the board, get the features and stories from your agile tool (Jira or AzureDevOps).

2. Planning

The planning state offers the same functional features as a draft state. However, this is the state where you should do all of your planning activities, including moving stories to the teams and their respective sprints, create dependencies, set objectives, raise risks, and other related activities.

Recommendation: It is recommended to change the state of the board from "Draft" to "Planning" at least one day before the actual PI Planning session.

Please note: If you are sharing the URL of the board, pay attention that, URL will be different once you change the state of the board.

3. Tracking

Once the planning is completed, you can change the state of the board to Tracking. Board functionality remains the same in the tracking mode, however, Kendis starts monitoring the changes made to the board in this state, e.g.,

  • Features added to the board

  • Features removed from the board

  • New stories created

  • Estimate changes (Story Points) for the user stories

  • Sprint changes to the stories

  • Moving a user story from one team to another

These changes are available under the "Scope & Delivery Changes" section of the Smart Reports.

If your board is not in the tracking state, no changes will be visible under this section.

4. Close

Once your PI has ended or the board is no longer active, you can change the board state to "Close". In this state, the board will be locked automatically and no changes will be allowed, however, the admin user can still unlock the board and make the changes.

How to change the state

To change the board state follow these steps

  • Go to the "Board Settings" at the top right corner

  • A list of the board states will be shown.

  • The current state will have a green border around it

  • The older state will have the text "Read-only" under the state.

  • To switch the state, click on the state label.

Here is an example, where the board is currently in the "Planning" state

How do I know if I am in the older state?

If you are view board in the older state, the board will be locked by default and there will be a red line under the board header and also the lock sign will be visible

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