How to track Business Analyst work for writing user stories?

[Zena Majid]

We have Jira enterprise, with Portfolio add-on.

We have 6 developer teams. We use time tracking for developers to estimate their level of effort for each ticket. We would like the same set of time tracking fields to be added for "BA Time Tracking) to give us a glimpse of how long it took for Business Analysts to write the user story and how many hours did they estimated before writing it.

Do you know of a tool within Atlassian that could help us track hours (log work) for business analysts user story writing efforts?

[Peter Jessen]

Hi @Zena Majid,

This is not a Jira Align question, given your provided configuration of Jira and Portfolio.

What module or add-in are you using for time tracking? How are you currently tracking developer time?

The easiest way to solve for this is to use sub-tasks under stories. The BAs would simply have sub-tasks for the actual writing of the story and refinement of the story.

Jira Align does have an option time tracking component that you can read about in the 10X: How to Get Started with Time Tracking article.

Regards,
Peter

[Zena Majid]

Hello and thank you for your reply. 

We have Jira Enterprise with the Portfolio feature enabled.

We are using Time Tracking fields (screen capture below) where developers can estimate a user story and log their time in the "log time" field.

Your suggestion to create sub tasks under the user story is great but the LOE BAs add will be counted towards the LOE actually estimating dev. work. Because when BAs move the ticket to the sprint, the sub task will move with it. Sorry if that doesn't make sense.

What we're hoping for BAs is to create another time tracking section similar to this one for them to estimate the time it will take them to write user stories and log actual work hours as they go. That way we can report on this to see how long did it take them to write a user story from start to finish (meaning from initial analysis to the time it's story pitched and ready for devs.)

We ware not looking however for this to be used for billing purposes like a timesheet. Our objective is to measure productivity. 

  

[Peter Jessen]

Hi @Zena Majid,

As a coach, I will simply state that this is a completely non-agile anti-pattern, but that is me wearing my coach hat.

A possible (EXTREMELY NON-AGILE) solution: A way to do what you are asking in Jira is to have the BAs have their own sprints parallel to the dev team. They would create, sub-task, and refine the stories in their sprints. Use the same fields as you use with the dev team.

When the stories are ready to be consumed by the dev team, clone the stories over to the dev team sprints and remove the BA-specific sub-tasks once cloned.

The BA sprints will contain stories with their hours on their sub-tasks. The dev sprints will contain stories without the BA sub-tasks and hours.

Like I said, this is extremely non-agile, but should give you what you want without messing with your dev metrics.

Regards,
Peter

[Zena Majid]

Thanks for your Peter!

I would like to preface by saying That when I asked the question, I absolutely recognized that the request was not the agile way of doing things. However, with the situation at work currently,  the need came up where we were instructed to report on that activity specifically.

Your solution might work to satisfy our needs, but I fear for the extra administrative burden business anaylsts will have to do to make this reportable.

Thanks again!

[Peter Jessen]

Hi @Zena Majid,

You are very welcome. I assumed you knew it wasn't very agile, but it bore saying. :-)

It's the only solution I can think of that is relatively simply, uses your existing tools, and doesn't lead to stories spanning multiple sprints due to the BAs doing the work in sprints prior to the team consuming them.

Good look.

Regards,
Peter