I work in an AGILE development team, but with waterfall deliveries to the client

[vikkiGarner]

I work in an AGILE development team, with two week sprints to complete a change request. However we then move to a waterfall like model for deliveries. e.g. we will deliver 3 sprints into a release for a testing phase of 2 weeks. YES this is an issue and YES I am trying to change this. 

However my current issue, is moving the stories and story defects into a new flow for release testing, as at current we move to a physical board or Trello which looses traceability.

We need to be able to close and conclude a sprint for Burndown and reporting purposes but I then need a board that I can create to trace the CR's and Defects for further validation on different data and code stream before delivery to Customer.  

[Scott Theus]

Hi @vikkiGarner ,

Thanks for an interesting question!  I think you may be able to accomplish this with a Kanban board for your testing phase. Here are my thoughts:

I am picturing your workflow as having a distinct status (I'll call it "QA TEST") where Defects and CRs move to QA Test, and everything after either verifies it is ready to release and then "Done" or finds additional CRs or Defects and sends it back to the Sprint backlog or a Sprint. If this is correct then

• Adjust your Sprint Board filter to include issues with statuses from "Create" to ""QA TEST."
• Set the "QA TEST" status as the only status in the right column of the sprint. This should  allow you to complete the sprint and close it out since the board will treat that status as done.
• Set the Kanban board filter to include issues with the status "QA TEST" through "DONE" and that release (fixversion)
• Set "QA TEST" in the left most column of your Kanban board.
• Set "DONE" in the right most column of the Kanban board. 

If this works the way I'm picturing it in my mind, all of your development work will move through the workflow in sprints, then when development is finished and the issues are ready to test the workflow will move to the Kanban board for testing. Once everything in the Kanban board for that fixversion is in the "Done" column, use the release button to release the version.

You'll also probably want to set up a Kanban board that includes all of the statuses, Create to Done, so you can track them throughout the workflow separately from the releases.

I suggest testing this out in a sandbox or test project first, though. I've never done it IRL.

Hope this helps, please let me know if it works!

-Scott