Stories have a status that models progression of work through a system. Your team can decide how your system of work will operate but here’s a starting point:

• Triage
  • for newly discovered work, this needs to be triaged before being accepted into the plan
• Planned
  • for work that has been accepted into the current plan (one of the identified milestones). Planned work will contribute to overall story counts for a milestone. A
  • a story is considered discovered once it has been planned
• To Do
  • for work selected as the next 5 things to do using pull based planning
• Doing
  • for work that is currently in play
  • all you need is Doing, don’t overcomplicate it
• Done
  • for work that is done (according to your team’s definition of done)
• Archived
  • for work that is done and that we still want to keep track of but we don’t want hanging around and creating noise on our Kanban
  • work that is Done is automatically archived every few weeks
• Later
  • for work that isn’t part of any current milestone but you can’t bear to throw away (although you probably should to reduce waste)