New to Jira in the Cloud - does anyone else have multiple environment deployments?

[ticia y mcgean]

I started working for NYS recently after being in the private sector for many years that included a dev-ops team that supported all of our Jira needs. I used to be the admin over 10 years ago when we first started using it on my team when we went Agile at GE but it is a lot different now I am finding. Add to that with the state we have a Dev environment, a QA (Eval) environment and then we move to Prod. I am trying to figure out the best way to move things along so that they don't have to span multiple sprints when they move from Dev to QA as QA really means UAT and that is when we ask the end users to do some high level testing. We are doing automation in Dev for new functionality as well as bugs. Any suggestions on where I could get some advice or a workflow that handles this type of scenario?

Thanks!!

[David Ashlock]

Hi there!  A few thoughts for you:

Are the users doing the UAT actively participating as stakeholders in the Sprint Review?  If so, that would be a good opportunity for them to participate, but shouldn't be the only time.  The development team can engage with stakeholders throughout the Sprint to gather feedback, of which UAT is part.

Does your Definition of Done incorporate passing the Increment through Dev and QA/UAT?

Is it possible to incorporate TDD or ATDD that would satisfy or replace UAT?

[ticia y mcgean]

They are stakeholders but we have not started doing Sprint Review with stakeholders outside of the immediate team (I have that on my radar, we Just got our QA automation engineer a month ago and are doing a lot of catch up). 

We do not have the incorporation of the hand off to QA in the DoD. Thank you for the reminder, I will add that to tomorrow's backlog grooming session to discuss. 

With the new QA member I plan on incorporating ATDD but we will not be able to get rid of the UAT hand off entirely as they are end users that always find things that were not brought up in requirements gathering as is usually the case. :) Dev does work with them during the sprint to insure that we are implementing as they requested though.