Discussions happen in a variety of places and ways - email, in the hallway, on the phone, via internet messaging. With distributed teams, it becomes even more important for communication about stories to be available to everyone in the team to track decision making and the history behind the stories. StarTeam Agile provides a Discussion feature that allows team members to communicate and retain this history on the Teamboard within the context of the sprint.

Administrators and Contributors on the product team can start a discussion by clicking on the chat bubble in the top right of the Teamboard menu. The Discussion panel will appear listing existing discussion threads from that sprint as well as an option to create a new thread. A discussion thread will automatically be started when a task is blocked on the teamboard.

When a discussion is started in reference to a story, the discussion will be added to the story card under the Mentions tab. 

Discussions can be about any topic that is relevant to the team and will be listed in the Discussions panel by the most recent activity. If a reply is posted to an earlier thread, that thread will move to the top of the panel. Discussion threads will stay with the sprint. Every sprint will start with a blank Discussion panel.