Best practice for tracking work items through Dev/QA/UAT/Prod environments?

Colin Scott_l4a3rr

Hi everyone. I am a jira admin at a mid-size tech/service company. I have a conundrum I've been thinking about for quite some time, and I was hoping you all might have some similar experiences and advice.

We are not very mature with our release management processes, yet. Our platform releases are generally once a month or so. Often times code will sit in a testing environment for a few weeks before being marked as "ready for production" or something else. Teams are tracking this in different ways, and some aren't tracking it at all in Jira.

I keep getting requests to include statuses like "In QA" or "Ready for Release." But, when development is done on an issue, we want it to be Done. Keeping these post-development statuses keeps work from being finished and it makes it look like our teams are never accomplishing anything in a sprint. For this reason, we'd really like to focus on To Do, In Progress, and Done statuses.

How would you suggest tracking development work items as they move through these regions?

roman_l0djep

Hi @Colin Scott,

we use custom fields on Jira issues for QA and Documentation status. That way an issue can be in Done status, but have QA status set to Testing Required (screenshot attached below). When I am done with testing the fix or feature, and it is good to go, I change the value of the field to Done. That way I am not changing the issue’s status.

If after testing the issue I can see that it is not done, I leave the QA status as is (Testing required), and change the issue’s status to Re-opened.

To always have an up-to-date list of issues I need to test I have a widget on my Jira dashboard that shows me issues with Testing Required value in QA Status field.

I can’t be certain this approach is the right way for your use-case, but I hope it help fostering ideas on how to achieve what you need.

Roman.