Is there any way to differentiate a development task and testing task in jira

Question

Dear All,

I have  a scrum board and the workflows are

to do,in progress ,ready for testing ,ready for deployment and done.

I have the user stories tagged to the epic.

I have  different team for testing and development.

Now the developer has completed the development,unit tested it .so the story move to ready for testing. Due to the lack of the developers, the story is in ready for testing by the end of the sprint.

So when i close the sprint ,the story is in ready for testing mode only.What do i need to do here .Does the story has to be moved to to do .If so ,how will i differentiate that the story has to go in ready for testing in the next sprint.

or

As the story remains in the testing ,it will not be shown that the story is completed and it affecting velocity show up to management.

Suggest me what i can do in these  scenarios

Kavitha Kandula · Answer

Thanks Walter for detailed answer.

Walter Buggenhout · Answer

Hi @Kavitha Kandula,

You are asking a process question here and answers to those can be very long. I will try to keep it to the point and give you some food for thought.

From the description of your process, it seems that you consider your story to be done once it is deployed. Or maybe when it is ready to be deployed, but I leave that up to you. I like that approach, for as long as your story isn't validated you cannot possibly say with confidence that no additional work will be needed afterwards. So if your story is not completed as long as it isn't tested, it would be wrong to claim that it is done.

So what happens with your issues when you close your sprint, you ask. Jira will ask you what it should do with your incomplete issues. At that point, you add them to the next sprint. When you start that sprint, you will see that those issues will still be in status Ready for testing, just as they were before. Moving an issue to another sprint does not impact its status whatsoever.

This does, however, as you point out the velocity of your team. But I am afraid that this is just indicating a problem in your process to deliver working software. The fact that you have different teams (potentially) creates a bottleneck in your process, where the development team may start to feel unhappy about their velocity as it is measured on output they cannot control.

So you should work on improving that. Your testing team will be working on issues that get assigned to them. Maybe only from your development team, maybe also from other teams. It is not uncommon to set up a Kanban Board for your testing team, that has the Ready for testing status from your stories as the first status on the board. If you added a status 'Testing' to your story workflow, that would allow your testers to formally start work on that issue and indicate to you that testing is in progress. When they complete tests, they can mark the story as ready for deployment to hand the story back over to your (or the deployment) team. All the testing team needs, is a single Kanban board with 3 columns: Ready for testing - testing - ready for deployment (I am leaving out the scenario when bugs are encountered, but I am sure you are getting the picture).