How to track and manage QA work estimates in greenhopper

[Gail Stewart]

As a QA Engineer I would like to be able to enter QA time separately from Development time and have the sum of the two times be displayed in the Greenhopper Dashboards.

[Gail Stewart · Accepted solution]

The answer is that there is no good way to estimate and then track qa time. The estimate (original) time is not rolled up - although the time remaining is - so in the planning stage it is useless. (when using sub-tasks). Creating two tickets, one for the development and one for the testing is sometimes the right answer and sometimes not. I believe this is one of the incomplete answers in the Agile process itself. While it says "everything must be tested" - the process is vague with respect to the entirety of QA and really is talking about unit testing most of the time.

[Ralph Hagemeier]

I need to see what the workload is per developer/QA engineer. Based on Atlassian's response there is no way to do that (unless I will create one issue for qa and one for development).

[Gail Stewart]

The answer is that there is no good way to estimate and then track qa time. The estimate (original) time is not rolled up - although the time remaining is - so in the planning stage it is useless. (when using sub-tasks). Creating two tickets, one for the development and one for the testing is sometimes the right answer and sometimes not. I believe this is one of the incomplete answers in the Agile process itself. While it says "everything must be tested" - the process is vague with respect to the entirety of QA and really is talking about unit testing most of the time.

[Alex]

Hi Gail, You might also consider adding a subtask to the issue specifically for QA and logging time against that issue. That way if you are able to quickly tell (without having to figure out who is who by role) how much time spefically was spent on QA as opposed to development. Additionally, the time spent on a sub-task should be summed with the time spent on the parent issue for reporting purposes (if you've configured your project to do so).

Hope this helps. :-)

Alex

[EddieW]

Gail, all time tracked is tied to the person, and you should be able to break it out by assignee in dashboard reports, but Greenhopper roles up all time, which is how the task should be estimated. (a task is estimated for both dev and QA time, and only complete once both are finished)