Count story points in workflow step prior to "Done"

Question

Our workflow has a number of lanes after the development team has delivered a Story:

* Internal testing (This is a separate role in our organisation, outside the team, and different from the code reviews which the Developers do themselves witin the Sprint)
* External testing (The customer tests the Stories)
* Ready for Deployment (Once approved by the customer, Stories enter this lane)
* Done (Once deployed to Production, Stories reach this stage, and the workflow is complete)

This renders the default charts (Velocity, Sprint and Release Burndown) unusable at the end of the Sprint, as no Stories are counted as Done, showing a completed number of Story Points/velocity of 0. Ideally, we want to count the Story Points of all Stories which made it to Internal testing at the end of the Sprint. Is there any way to achieve this?

Note: I have seen the related anwsered question. However, since they only had one additional step at the end, the proposed solution does not work for this case.

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

There's no need for another tool, you just need to correct your definition of done.

Two boards is probably the answer for you here.  You won't have the "issues automatically closed" problem if you define the boards differently.  The development board needs to have a last column that means "done for the team that the board represents" and the other board, for the non-development team doing the tracking outside the development cycles needs a different "done" column

Mathias_vru976 · Answer

Hi Nic,

Thanks for your suggestion. I do have some follow-up questions, as we currently use Jira to track the entire process as described from start to delivery to client, and moving away from this/using a second, new, tool on top of Jira for the last steps is not very likely to get adapted by the organisation.

The issue with having the final steps in the last column is that the last column is cleared at the end of every Sprint, so we wouldn't be able to track the work beyond that point in time, I believe. In addition, I'm not familiar with how we would be able to differentiate between steps if they are in the same lane?

As an alternative, we thought about creating two separate boards: One for Development, going up to Ready for Internal Testing, as you suggest, and a second one, starting from there. I still think this could be a good idea, we just need to work around the fact that the Stories are automatically closed when they reach the final column of the first board!

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Answer

It looks to me like your definition of done is wrong for the development team.  You've got it as "deployed", but the actual definition for development is "ready for internal testing"

Change your board definition to reflect that - "ready for internal testing" should be the last column on the board, and the next three steps in your list either in the last column with it, or not even mapped on the board.