Rally Software

There is no documentation on this field in HELP.  I think it has something to do with Kanban teams and not updating the ScheduleState on stories automatically.  Anyone have details that can help me understand it better?

When updating your tasks, the system will automatically update the state of User Story if it's the last one.  For example, when you mark the last task as complete, the state of the User Story will change to complete.  You can choose to disable this feature at the project level.

Thank you Sheri!  Do you have a use case of when this would be helpful to disable?

Becky -

As Sheri indicated, this flag prevents the User Story from changing state when the state of a child Task is updated.  There is a full description of this in the help here:

    https://help.rallydev.com/task-state-updates-parent-schedule-state

Many Kanban Teams like to disable these auto-state changes because having state unintentionally move forward/backward causes inconsistencies with their flow-based (i.e., Time in State) metrics. We also see teams that use the same User Story for development and deployment disable the auto-state changes. In this case, all of the development tasks are created and Completed first, which causes the Story to be marked Completed. Later, the deployment Tasks are added to the Story, which causes the state to move back to In Progress (since not all Tasks are completed anymore). These teams would rather do the Story state changes manually so they can choose when the Story is considered "Complete" for their metrics -- when development is done or when deployment is done.

Is the setting intended to have a the same effect on parent stories (stories with other stories parented to them)? I have found if I uncheck the box for tasks then my parent stories' schedule states become frozen. I can't adjust them manually in any screen and they don't move automatically like they did before.