Deep Dive Models in Agile (Part 5): State Models

Candase is a Senior Product Manager at Seilevel and a PMI-Agile Certified Practitioner who trains and coaches product owners, ScrumMasters and business analysts on agile approaches as well as championing products in those roles for clients.

  Agile  

This series provides valuable information for the product owner community to use additional good practices in their projects. In each edition of this series, we take one of the most commonly used visual models in agile and explain how to create one—and how to use one to help build, groom or elaborate your agile backlog.

This installment covers state models, which include both state diagrams and state tables. (If you missed any of our previous editions, you can catch up: process flows, feature trees, business objectives models and business data diagrams).

What is a state model?
State models include two RML data models (state tables and state diagrams) that show the transition of an object through various states or statuses, including which transitions are valid and what triggers an object to transition state. A state is a short-form description of a stage in a data object’s life that influences the behavior of the system. These two models are covered together here because they generally show the same information, just in different ways. These models are great for any object that has state about which there might be business rules (like workflow processes).

The state table is the tabular format of state data with one state table being created for each object that has state transitions. It consists of a table with all the applicable states for the object …

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