Schedule State is somewhat customizable so it
can mean whatever your organization needs for it to mean but I can tell you how the four default Schedule State values are used by my company, which is fairly typical:
- Defined: This is your backlog of work that has not yet been started.
- In-Progress: This is your first active working state, and moving a story or defect to In-Progress starts the cycle time clock if you're meauring cycle times.
- Completed: Development and testing has been completed and the work is waiting for a product owner (or similar role) to verify and accept it. At my company we have both Scrum and Kanban teams and the Kanban teams often skip the Completed state.
- Accepted: This is typically your unabiguous "done" state, and the cycle time clock stops on the Accepted Date.
Hope that helps.