Despite present since the RTM version, the metastates became notorious to the mainstream after the introduction of the Kanban Board. Why? Let’s see…
New, Approved, Committed and Done are metastates. Have you ever heard about them before? I don’t think so J
They are not something particular, but just an aggregator of various states for Work Item Types. Metastates are defined into the Process Template of course, in our case just for the Product Backlog Item Work Items:
As we see, we can have a Proposed (state) Work Item which can be either New or Approved.
This is the easiest sample, you can customize the board to show more metastates, you can report against them, and much more.