Using Two Boards to track an issue.

Question

Let me start off by saying I know what I'm about to describe is not Agile.  At present, I cannot change this.  In the future I might be able to, but in the meantime, I am looking for a technology solution in Jira that can help.

With that being said, I have workflow where once Development/QA is done with their work, issues move to a second testing team that reviews the work prior to Done.  We split this across two sprints, a dev "sprint" and a testing "sprint".  Right now, no development takes place during the testing sprint, so I track the work by combining the two "sprints" into one Jira Sprint.  That break in development is going to be going away, and I need a way to track the work through the workflow while a dev sprint and testing sprint are both active in Jira.

Can I do this through two boards in the project, a dev board and a testing board?  Is there a way to split one workflow between two boards so that it looks like the work is done for one sprint and ready to start for the next sprint?

Sorry if this doesn't make sense, but this is the best way I can describe the issue.

Thanks in advance!!

Trudy P Claspill · Answer

Hello @David Frohwitter

Are you working with a Company Managed or a Team Managed project.

I also work mostly with Kanban, but have the latitude to do some experimenting since I am a JIRA Admin.

I did an experiment with a Company Managed project with a simple workflow; To Do, Dev Done, and Test Done. It is important to note that "Dev Done" belongs to the "In Progress" Status Category; it is a "blue" status not a "green" status.

I set the Post Functions in each transition to address the Resolution field. For the transitions to To Do and Dev Done the post function cleared the Resolution field. For the transition to Test Done the Resolution field was set to Done.

I set up one board for "development" with columns just for To Do and Dev Done. Dev Done was the right most column. When I closed a sprint there, the issues in the Dev Done column were considered "complete" - JIRA did not think they needed to be moved to the next sprint or the backlog. However, the Resolution and Resolved Date fields did not get set.

I set up a second board for "Testing" with columns just for Dev Done and Test Done. The issue "completed" in the Development board (with a status of Dev Done) showed as in the Backlog in the Testing board. The issue could be added to a sprint and that sprint completed.

The problem with this, though, is that when the issue was Dev Done and the development board sprint was closed, the burndown chart for that sprint showed no points completed because the issue was not transitioning to a status in the "green" Done Status Category.

So you while you could run two different sprints on the same issues with one workflow, the sprints for the development team would not accumulate velocity and burn down stats.

An alternative you might want to consider is having separate stories for the development work and for the test work. Each story for each team could run completely through the workflow, in independent sprints, get transitioned to Done, and show proper velocity and burn down stats.

You could even potentially use Automation to automatically create the Test stories when the Dev stories transition to Done.

John Funk · Answer

Hi David - Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

I don't do a lot of work with Sprints - we are a Kanban shop. But will take a stab at this.

You can create two boards, but I think the first one would have to be a Kanban board and not a Sprint board. That's because when you move an issue into the last column on the board, it will mark it as Resolved - no matter what status it is in.

So you could have your single workflow as it moves through the different steps, and just associate the statuses uniquely to the boards. You could even have the last status on the first board (a Kanban board) be the first status on the Sprint board. That way the same issue shows up in both places, until it moves out of the first column of the Sprint board.

Now, I have no idea if that will really work for what you are trying to do, but I would say test it out and see.  :-)