Explanation on what "Transition" means in Insights in Agile Central.

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Issue/Introduction

Is there an explanation anywhere on what “Transition" means?

 

Environment

Release:
Component: ACSAAS

Resolution

The transition field indicates what impact the story had on Throughput or Velocity. As for what it means, hopefully the following provides some clarification:

We use a Story/Defect's ScheduleState to determine Throughput and Velocity, and the ScheduleState's field's possible values have an ordering.  By default the ordering is:  Idea < Defined < In-Progress < Completed < Accepted < Released. We look at the ScheduleState of a story relative to the "Accepted" state.  For brevity's sake, let's refer to {Idea, Defined, In-Progress, Completed} as "in-progress", and {Accepted, Released} as "done".

For a story with a Positive transition, during the month the story went from in-progress to done.  It adds +1 throughput or the story points to the velocity.

For a Rejected story:  The story was done coming into the current month, but regressed back to in-progress.  This will subtract from throughput or velocity.  E.g. for US180917, I presume the story was previously Accepted but ended the month as "Completed" (which we consider in-progress since presumably a PO hasn't accepted the work yet).

Neutral:  This can mean 2 different things, both of which have no overall impact on throughput/velocity:

- the story regressed from done back to in-progress, then was marked as done again.  E.g. Accepted -> In-Progress -> Accepted.

- the story was in-progress, marked as done, then went back to in-progress.  E.g. In-Progress -> Accepted -> In-Progress.

The reason we include these "Neutral" transitions in the drill down is because we figure it would be nice to have some indication if teams are moving finished stories back to in-progress often, which, depending on the specifics of the process you follow, can signal there may be issues.