Is there a process or common practice that utilizes 3 columns for QA?

Question

Currently, our Tickets come from "Code Review" straight to "Ready for QA" and then to "In QA", when a tester picks up the ticket.
The issues are that:
A) sometimes the Developer will move to "Ready for QA" when the code has not been merged yet, therefor the ticket will Fail and be moved back.
B)  Sometimes a ticket may be waiting for completed work from another team. Where our team is concerned, the code is ready. But since the tester is waiting for completed code on another team, the ticket remains in "Ready for QA" when in fact it is not.

Our Board currently utilizes 6 columns. I am sure someone with Permissions can add a column. I am just curious if there is a practice where there is a "QA - On Hold",  "Ready For QA" and then "In QA"?

Jack Brickey_h10pa4 · Accepted Answer

Hi Brad and welcome to the Community. This really comes down to preferences and how rigid your process is or needs to be. In a past life I had a fairly rigid process around the QA area but overtime evolved. The rigitity was driven by trying to agile-ize my waterfall process. We went agile in dev but remained waterfall in QA. A common occurrence from my experience. What I ended up doing was to create a workflow that was rather complex. It had a Dev_Done status that would allow the team to complete sprints effectively. The Dev_Done was followed by a number of QA statuses, e.g. Ready_for_Test, In_Test, Validated.  Then QA team use a Kanban board for their process. When we completed the sprint the Dev_Done issues were transitioned to Ready_for_Test. Regarding the issue about things being done but depending on other dev issues being completed, I would suggest you use links, e.g. "blocked by". Then your QA team can wait for both issues to be in the Ready_for_QA status before moving them into test.

Ultimately, I found this process very complex but it worked. Hope this helps.