Pivotal Tracker "Finished" vs "Delivered"

Question

While other story states are self-explanatory, I'm not quite sure what is the intended use of 2 distinct Finished and Delivered states.

I have watched the videos on the Pivotal website, but found them unhelpful - they just state that we can mark the story using those states, but does not explain how does it relate to the workflow.

So, why do we need them? What happens after the developer marks the story as Finished and before it gets Delivered?

I assume the following workflow:

• A developer starts to work on the story, marking it as Started
• Once the story tasks are completed and it passes the unit tests - it is marked as Finished
• After ??? it is marked as Delivered
• Then, after QA it can be Accepted or Rejected and restarted, if necessary.

Should we mark the story as Finished before some other kind of testing and then Delivered once it passes? Or maybe it should involve code review? Perhaps this is a common knowledge in agile/scrum world, that I am yet unaware of?

I do understand that this mostly depends on the conventions, established in the project, but I am looking for some best practices, since we are just starting to incorporate Pivotal Tracker into our workflow.

Answer 1

I just had this same question and watched those same videos you did, but also found a more detailed article on Tracker's workflow.

Based on their explanation, I have modified your steps as below. Obviously everyone is going to have slightly different takes on this, but I've tried to see things through the way your company might work based on your initial steps.

• A developer starts to work on the story, marking it as Started
• Once the story tasks are completed and it passes the unit tests - it is marked as Finished
• Once the code is successfully deployed to the stage or test environment, it is marked as Delivered
• Then, after QA it can be Accepted or Rejected and restarted, if necessary.

Hopefully this is helpful.