How to retain sprints and reports when doing testing later

Question

Hi all,

We currently have implemented JIRA in a way that we use the sprints (2 weeks) to do Development and Test work (so at the end it's according to DoD). Now it's decided that testing will have their own lifecycle to go on (more isolated in a QA team.

The first solution is to extend a sprint with an extra colomn. QA can then start with the issues when they are ready for it. Even if it's not in the current sprint.

The problem i foresee is that all the reports regarding sprints are not functioning anymore. Velocity of the dev team, burndown chart etc.

Is it possible to create a new funnel to put in a sprint so that testers can have their own sprint based on a different status. For example:

Ready for development
Development In Progress
Ready for Testing 
Testing In Progress
Resolved
Closed

The first three are in the sprint (funnel) of the developers and the last three are in the funnel of the testers who have their own backlog (items that have the status Ready For Testing) and their own sprint todo. Perhaps they will even go work in a more Kanban way that just give information of the progression.

I hope someone can give me feedback how to create this or similar situation in JIRA !!

If you have more questions, please just ask.

Peter van den Ochtend · Answer

@Sten Sundelin,

We had a meeting about this and we discussed about the following:

Current Workflow:

Open / Reopened | In Progress | Ready To Deploy | Test | Resolved / Closed

The new situation is more like:

Open / Reopened | In Progress | Ready To Deploy | Review | DEV Finished ||| Test | In Progress | Resolved ||| Closed (not visible)

It would be nice if the DEV team (OPEN till Review (included)) have their own sprint and board. When they put it on "DEV Finished" the points are released for the sprint reports etc. Then they will appear in the backlog (or list) of the TEST Team (that goes from Test till Resolved). They work on their own pace.

The situation is that we now add a colomn to the workflow and all the issues will stay in the sprint of everyone. So if the testers are able to finish the issue two weeks later we see that item in our sprint all the time...... So our sprint reports are more and more a fake value for us.

By the way. We use JIRA Version 6.4

Peter van den Ochtend · Answer

Today we have a meeting for it. I will suggest the situation and recreate the situation in our test environment. I hope that this one will work. Then I will accept this as an answer

Sten Sundelin · Answer

If you map the last four status values to the last column in the Development Scrum board, JIRA will consider those 'Done' in the Sprint (as soon as they reach "Ready for Testing") without you having to set the Resolution.

Then have another board for QA (possibly Kanban, as you say) to pick up the pieces...